


Pretender To The Throne

by BrooklynBugleBoy



Series: PretenderToTheCrown!AU [1]
Category: Bohemian Rhapsody (Movie 2018), Queen (Band), Rock Music RPF
Genre: :), Angels, Aunties, Dead People, Drama queens, F/M, Fix-It of Sorts, Gay Male Character, Healing Magic, Hereditary Gay, Implied/Referenced Past Child Abuse, M/M, Magic, Miracles, Nephilim, Nicknames, Other, Parent Death, Period-Typical Ableism, Period-Typical Homophobia, Period-Typical Racial Tensions, Probably Blasphemy TBH, Psychic Abilities, Supernatural Elements, Tags Subject to Change, Thalidomide, This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things, Weird Plot Shit, polio
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-09-29
Updated: 2018-12-02
Packaged: 2019-07-18 21:10:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 37,312
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16126811
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BrooklynBugleBoy/pseuds/BrooklynBugleBoy
Summary: (Alternatively titled: "I'd Rather Have The Cat"). ;)Four disaster Queens and a precocious nine-year-old boy. Oh, what ever could go wrong?The story of a little boy from nothing, who gets everything... (or perhaps it’s the other way around?).A boy with Gifts who squanders them.A teenager figuring out who he’s meant to be, in a world where everyone else has an opinion.And finally, all of it culminating in the birth of a young man who would do anything to help those in need, even if doing so meant losing the one thing that he couldn’t live without...(Growing up is hard. Healing others is harder. But living with your mistakes is possibly the hardest of all).(A.K.A Freddie's got a son). ;)





	1. My Fairy King (1967-1976)

**Author's Note:**

> Hey guys! 
> 
> I need to let you know that this is wholly a work of fiction. These are fictionalized versions of real people and events. None of this actually transpired the way it is written here. Sky is a creation inspired by my desire and curiosity on what a child of Freddie may have been like. He. Is. Not. Real. :) 
> 
>    
> You are all darlings in my eyes, enjoy if you must! :) <3
> 
> UPDATE (12/2): Sorry, not a real update! I just decided to say I'm mixing a lot of movie elements into the story and a new update should be rolling out pretty soon! I'm smoothing out some of these raw ends. To make something great :D I know its not all that great but it's under-construction! :D
> 
> Featured is Queen's "My Fairy King"

_Rolling Stone: "In the early 1970s, when [girlfriend Mary] Austin suggested they have a child together, Mercury allegedly responded, 'I'd rather have a cat.'"_

 

 

 

  
Some of Sky's earliest memories were of  _Queen_  songs. 

  
Most were off-key _(read: horrible)_ renditions sung by his mother, but the words were still the same. 

  
_"In the land where horses born with eagle wings_  
_And honey bees have lost their stings_  
_There's singing forever, ooh yeah..._  
_Lion's den with fallow deer_  
_And rivers made from wine so clear_  
_Flow on and on forever..._

 _Dragons fly like sparrows thru' the air_  
_And baby lambs where Samson dares_  
_To go on on on on on on.._."

  
_My Fairy King_  was his favorite, right from the moment it came out on shiny vinyl record, when he was just six years old. He had his own copy too, played it so hard and so often that it was scratched and worn to high heaven.

 

But it wasn't the same without his mother to hold him close and sing terribly in the wrong key, flubbing up the transitions and cues. She always tried, he had to give her credit. It was her favorite too.

  
She liked all of the songs about _Rhye_.

  
"It reminds of your Daddy, _Rhys_." She would whisper to him, as they huddled together on an old futon, in their gross one-room apartment, the black mold on the ceiling grew in funny ways reminiscent of the animal crackers she would often pack away in his lunch-kit. "He was _My Fairy King_." She would look away, almost wistful for a moment, before covering his tiny body in kisses that made him squeal indignantly, desperately trying to bat her hands away. 

  
"And you're  _My Fairy Prince!_ " She would say. "So I'm going to eat you all up! _Sugar and spice and everything nice!"_  

  
Making monster noises as she tickled the everliving daylights out of him. He would laugh until he was crying and breathless, watery eyes staring up at her with cheeks flushed pink. 

  
"No, Mama!" He would protest in mock-offense. "I'm a  _boy!_ Those are for  _girls!"_

  
"Ah!" She would pause as if it were some great revelation. " _Snips, snails and puppy-dog tails!_ ...Oh no, that doesn't sound anything like my little _Prince Rhye_ at all!" 

  
She named him _Rhye_ after the make-believe world that his father had created in his youth. 

  
According to her, he used to tell stories about it to anyone who would listen and sketch out the most beautiful scenes in the margins of his notebooks. They grew closer during his last days at _Isleworth Polytechnic_ , right before he transferred to _Ealing Art College_ in London. He was so gifted, so smart. They only shared a few classes together in a handful of months, but it was enough to leave her smitten. He was charismatic, beautiful and almost as otherworldly as the dreams he’d had for himself. 

  
He’d had the most lovely smile, those protruding teeth that she'd always found so adorable, but that he'd always expressly hated.

  
She _loved_ how Sky had inherited that same smile.

  
When his adult teeth came in and the sight alone made him cry, she told him he looked positively exquisite in their distinctness. _(Sky thought he looked like even more of a sideshow freak)._

  
Of all the things in life, that were either foisted upon him or lovingly given, he actually picked the nickname _Sky_. 

  
Coined it as a toddler when _Rhye_ was too hard to say, it was a made up name anyway. Only his mother _(and then Cole in later years)_ was allowed to call him that, or any little pet-names derived from it.  _Rhys. Rhy-Guy. Prince Rhye_ …

  
_Rhye Halley Bulsara._ Named after a pretend land, a comet and a man who didn't even know he existed.

  
But that was okay.

  
It was _okay_ , because he always had his mother. She was his _everything._ She loved him for his weird eyes _(that his classmates always made fun of without fail. Until they realized he knew all his math facts and could easily prove them stupid. Or you know, use his teeny tiny fists to cave their faces in)_ and the bulky teeth too big for his mouth. She loved him for his sparkly tutus over his stripey tights and brightly colored wellies, ( _that always found their way into the biggest puddles as they walked down the crowded streets of New York City)_. She loved him for the little songs he would make-up as he marched all his stuffed bears across the floor and the way he scrunched up his speckled nose when he laughed. 

  
She loved him because he was her son in every ounce, not just his father's prodigal. 

  
She was also _the strongest woman_ he ever knew. 

  
A single mother at nineteen, working two dead-end jobs just to keep them afloat, no insurance to speak of, no money for anything better, and no family to help her.

  
Then she woke up one morning to find her nine-month-old baby turned ashen gray, and with a fever that boiled beneath his skin like a blazing hellfire. He went from being able to crawl fervently and tug himself into standing positions on furniture, with a gummy smile, to not being able to raise his own head. 

  
_Polio._

  
_The Crippler of Children._  

  
Within mere hours he couldn't breathe on his own, eyes blown wide and lips a swollen sickening gray-blue, gums a bloodless white. Already wearing the guise of a corpse.

  
The doctors told his mother that he wouldn't last the night. They even asked if a _baptism and last rites_ were something she wanted.

  
Nineteen years old and she realized that there was no word for a parent who loses a child. A widower loses a wife, a widow loses a husband, an orphan loses their parents, but no one was _ever_ meant to outlive their child. 

  
She could've collapsed to pieces right then and there.

  
She could've just given up on him, like all the doctors and medical personnel who already had, and simply let him go. To join the ranks of the ghost children who'd died of the same crippling disease within the same beige walls of the fever hospital. Instead, _Roberta Rhodes_ , affectionately called _Birdy_ by all who knew her, demanded the best care for her child. 

  
She held him tight as they shoved a needle through the narrow slats of his spine to collect infected fluid. She sang every song she knew until her throat was raw as they bundled him up in an child-sized iron-lung to breathe for him. It was the late 60s, the heyday of polio was over, but for those few still unvaccinated, it never ended. 

  
Sky, the tiny boy that they told her wouldn't last the night, lived till morning. 

  
And then he did it again and again and again.

  
The full-body paralysis set in after ten days of being at death's door and the coming back was rough. It was months before he regained the use of his lungs independently. Longer still until his arms were back under his control.

  
He celebrated his first birthday in the hospital, looking eagerly at the fireworks that lit up the night sky, just outside his window. The next three birthdays were very much the same. Only for his third birthday: he got crutches, a hard plastic back-brace, and leg braces from his toes to his hips. Braces that had to be changed as he grew, lest they rip open his skin while he hobbled along. 

  
He drew pictures and finger-painted across his chest plates, a million smiling sunflowers and bright hand prints adorned each and every one. The beginnings of his love for art.

  
By four, all he needed were the leg braces and the crutches. By six it was just the leg braces and within a few months, not even those anymore. The countless painful surgeries to release the tight bits and replace the dead tissue in his legs worked wonders. Of course they also left scars that puckered and resembled the limbs of a stitched up voodoo doll, but they worked. 

  
He could run and jump and play, just like the rest of the children on the block. 

  
He could bounce around in puddles with his brightly colored wellies and be a prince with a toy crown and a scepter made of cardboard and pipe-cleaners. A style he would never really grow out of… something only furthered by the fact he always got at least one toy crown or tiara for his birthday each year.  

  
" _My fairy king can see things..._  
_He rules the air and turns the tides_  
_That are not there for you and me_  
_Ooh yeah, he guides the winds..._  
_My fairy king can do right and nothing wrong..."_

  
His eyes _changed_ after the polio. 

  
They had always been _heterochromic,_ two different colors. The right, a sharp cerulean reminiscent of his namesake, the left, a rich chocolate brown like melted down Hershey's bars. Hard and soft, all at once. 

  
His mother had always found his eyes _charming_ , a little piece of her and a little piece of his father. But after the polio, they _changed_. His pupils, the round little black discs in the center of his irises, _exploded_. They went from uniformly tiny circles to starbursts, with ragged edges stretched across both irises. The doctor who examined his eyes said that he'd never seen anything like it before, but that it was likely a birth defect. She just hadn't noticed it beforehand. 

  
That was a lie, as she had spent countless days and nights after his birth just staring at him. Trying to catalogue each and every feature. Nose? _Hers_. Skin tone? _Hers_. Cheek bones? _Freddie's_. Hair? _A mix of them both_ , her unruly curls with Freddie's coloring. Eyelashes? _Freddie's._

  
Those beloved eyes had never had starbursts within them before. 

  
But it was more than just his appearance. 

  
It was what he could _see_ with those eyes and _do_ with the things he saw, that made all the difference…

  
_The nurse_ had thick curly black hair like his own, big blue-gray eyes and wore a different outfit than the rest of them on the ward, hers looked older somehow, as if she'd come straight out of a sepia photograph. Wearing a strange bent flyaway cap on her head, one that did little to cover up much of anything at all. She would hum to herself quietly as she straightened up the blankets on his bed. But if he stared too long, the edges of her habit would darken and curl upwards, sparks flying and dying in front of his eyes. 

  
He saw her a few times, but they never spoke. 

  
Her lungs had been scorched into veritable ash by the fire that had sent the fever hospital into ruin during the early 1920s, they'd had to rebuild it from the ground up. So she wouldn't have been able to speak to him anyway. 

  
It was the first time he saw _The Dead_ walk. 

  
But it wasn't the last. 

  
His mother would hold him by the hand and tug him along when they walked through the city.

  
She had to, lest he stop to talk to those nice boys on the corner who'd died in the Revolutionary War, or the young Italian immigrant girl hovering around the flower shop, who'd lost her life in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, not even that little girl huddled in the gutter with her sallow skin and soiled a white dress, who'd succumbed to a turn-of-the-century Yellow Fever epidemic. 

  
His mother never _saw_ the spirits, but the fact that  _he did_ was enough for her to believe in them.

  
Birdy Rhodes, being the exhausted young woman she was, with fine yet incorrigible blonde curls that would slip from her bun after a long waitressing shift and a childhood touch of magic that never quite left her; would never make her son feel like he was a freak for any of the things he could do or any of the things he couldn't.

  
She just loved him with everything she had and did her best to be everything he needed her to be. Hell, she would've given him the whole world if it had been hers to give. As it stood, the best she could offer was a grand old name and all the blossoming love in her heart. 

  
Sky may not have had the greatest clothes or technology or living arrangements or even a father, but he had love. Even in those early years, he'd had love. 

  
From his mother, the center of his whole universe. 

  
From the young couple who ran a small records store on 7th Avenue.

  
They always saved copies of the latest Queen records for the small family and either sold them the vinyl at a dirt-cheap price or gave them to him and his mother for free.

  
Surely they saw the same very distinctive teeth on him as they did on the frontman of the British band, the same cheekbones, the same dark hair, the same fledgling face shape. They knew. They had to have known. But they never said anything about it. Never called the newspapers or prodded with uncomfortable questions. They just _loved_. And gave some of that burgeoning love to him and his mother. 

  
From the spirits who sought him out for comfort.

  
Apparently being earthbound was a fate worse than death. It was tantamount to living in a world full of muted grays and emptiness, except for people like him.  _Lighthouses_ , one spirit told him, a boy with the glassy eyes and hoarse voice of a diphtheria death,  _you're like a shining lighthouse in a storm. You come in color, all warm oranges and yellows turned gold._

  
_So a flashlight,_ he surmised. 

  
From his _Cole_. 

  
_Coltrane Brennan_ was an Irish kid turned American expat, named after the great American saxophone player and the only reason Sky learned about his  _real Gift_  at all. The seeing dead people thing was only part of it. The _easier_ part. 

  
As it turned out, he could give out just as much love as he got, just in a different way. Cole taught him that. 

  
Cole was _the first._

  
_It all started:_ with a bully stealing Sky's ratty sketchbook as he sat quietly on the swings, scribbling away.

  
_It ended:_ with Cole holding said sketchbook aloft, blood streaming from his nose and mouth, as well as a nasty cut on his forehead near his hairline, yet with a smile alight in sweet victory.

  
The bully lay crumpled in the dirt.

  
_It also ended_ with Cole joining him, as Sky snatched back his sketchbook and planted one leg-braced orthotic shoe on the chubby blonde's chest. A tiny six-year-old black-haired devil child who grit his ever-prominent buck teeth and hissed with pure venom: "Don't you  _ever_  fight my battles for me again, Coltrane Brennan. Or I'll knock your teeth in." 

  
"You'd know _all about teeth_ wouldn't you?" Cole had wheezed, all two years older and indignant, a flush high in his cheeks. 

  
Then he uttered those few accursed words: "Are you sure you aren't _an elephant? You've got tusks just like one!_ …And those _weirdo eyes_ to match!" 

  
By the time a flustered teacher came to drag them both to the principal's office, Cole was bleeding even more profusely than before and Sky was smiling smugly, two fistfuls of blonde hair in his grasp and one of Cole's front-teeth embedded in his denim jeans. 

  
They sat outside the office in silence, with only a small hard-backed chair between them. The only interruptions to the stillness were the squeak of Sky's braces when he swung his legs off the ground or Cole's pathetic sniffling as he tried to staunch the flow of blood from his face. Sky was scowling, still resolute in his righteous fury and absolution. Until he realized Cole wasn't just sniffling from the blood...

  
He was _crying._  

  
Instantaneous guilt burnt in Sky's chest like he'd swallowed a lit match, and _poof_ , all the anger and indignation was gone. A rarity for him. 

  
"Are you _crying...?_ " He asked, softly. 

  
But the moment Cole realized he'd been found out, he instantly straightened up in the stiff uncomfortable seat and turned away, as if pretending it was nothing at all. He snorted and scrubbed at his face with the one hand that wasn't full of crumpled up bloody tissues. His voice shook when he spoke, wavering and hoarse. Damning evidence of the tears that boys like them just couldn't admit.

  
"I'm not  _crying!_ Only babies cry! _Little crippled babies just like you!"_

  
Sky recoiled, his scowl deepening as the red-eyed older boy carried on running his mouth. "I told them not to steal your drawing stuff, cause there's just no point really. You're _soppy and sad_ enough as it is, without them messing with you..." Cole only managed to button his lips when there was a familiar fist pressing just under his swollen nose, against his chapped lips. 

  
"I swear _to God_ I'll knock another one out if you don't quit it! I'm not _a crip_ and I'm not _a baby_ , and don't you  _ever_  forget it." Sky spat, his funky eyes turned caustic. 

  
It only abated as he forced himself to apologize. Temper having run away from him once again. It was his most _adamant_ personality trait. 

  
"But I am _sorry about earlier_... Thanks for getting my sketchbook back, _I guess_." He bit his bottom lip and couldn't look the older boy in the eyes. 

  
“…Do you wanna see what I was drawing?" 

  
Cole paused, then nodded. Curiosity alight in his green eyes. 

  
Sky reached for where the teacher had roughly deposited both their backpacks, probably assuming they would be either sent home or in the office for a while, his ratty sketchbook was sitting on top. Hastily flung across both sacks as if the woman had no idea who it had belonged to. He dug through the heavily lined and crinkled pages to find his most recent creation. 

  
" _Oh_." Cole leaned over to see properly. "That's... _really good actually._ " 

  
Sky quirked an eyebrow. "Were you expecting something _bad?"_  

  
" _No!_ I just..." He peered even closer, almost close enough to brush his fingers across, but he didn't dare. "It's like a grown-up did it. Did you copy it from someplace?" 

  
The younger boy shook his head. Looking down at the scene he'd drawn, a fairy Queen of spring with lush curls and a smile as she sat upon a mushroom cap, her gossamer wings folded beneath her and a tiara made of tree branches and new leaves twisted in her hair. She was looking up at her King, he was dressed in wintertime clothes, snowflakes adorned his cape and the winds brought life to his frosted wings. He was cold and still, with long dark hair and piercing dark eyes. She looked like the growth of new life, he looked like the one who took it all away. But still, they reached for each other. 

  
"It's the king and queen of Rhye." 

  
He whispered, knowing very well that Rhye fell to ruin.

  
Good things didn't stay.

  
He felt something warm fall on his hand and noticed a few ruddy droplets of blood. Cole was bleeding still, the older boy quickly turned away, sniffling back into the tissues as if that were somehow going to do the trick. " _Sorry._.." He mumbled, shame and embarrassment coloring in the contours of his voice. 

  
"How bad is it? _Let me see._ " 

  
Sky commanded, sounding petulant as he reached out his hands. He gently caught Cole's chin in one, then jumped back on recoil, like he'd just been _electrocuted._

  
The moment he'd touched Cole's sticky skin, desperate to see how bad it was so that he could make him feel better, his hand had felt like he'd stuck it into an open lit flame. It _burned_ like holding the sun. He even flipped over his hand to gawk at his palm, certain that there had to be some kind of acid burn there or something. 

  
There was nothing. 

  
"What _the bleeding heck_ was that?!" Cole squealed, pulling the tissues back from his face. His nose and mouth had aptly stopped bleeding. Even the cut on his forehead had stopped. As if the faucet of the gaping maw had run dry. 

  
"You _burned_ me!" 

  
Cole looked incredulous at the accusation. "No I didn't! _You burned me!_ " 

  
"Nuh uh!" 

  
"Yeah huh!" 

  
Then Cole's expression changed, it turned surprised instead of upset, as his tongue poked at the inside of his cheek. "It's _gone._.." He whispered, wondrously. Looking at Sky with new eyes. 

  
"What's gone?" 

  
"When you punched me, I bit a whole chunk out of my cheek! It's why my mouth was bleeding so bad!" He took hold of the right side of his mouth and tried valiantly to flip it inside-out so that Sky could see. The younger boy couldn't see anything except for spit and pink healthy skin. 

  
"I don't _see_ anything..." 

  
"That's the point! _It's gone_..." He flipped it back over with eyes wide. " _Gone."_ He stressed again, as if Sky had missed it the first time. "Can mouths heal that fast?" Sky just shrugged, rubbing at his palm where the burn would've been, it tingled and itched, fingers twitching to do something else. Though he wasn't quite sure what. 

  
"How should I know?" He grumbled. "I'm not a doctor, I'm _six_." 

  
He swung his creaky braced legs back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, trying to drown out the world. Cole stopped him with a hand on top of his own. Green eyes met his own strange ones. "Touch me again." Sky furrowed his brows tight. 

  
"What?" 

  
_"Touch me again!_ " Cole demanded, jutting out his bottom lip. Sky rolled his eyes and did as requested, pressing his hand against Cole's chin again. There was nothing. No burn, no toasting warmth or electric shock. Nothing at all. Cole frowned, disappointed as he reached up to touch the gaping slit on his forehead, still as garish as before. What he needed were some stitches, or some wound glue or something. " _No!"_ He whined. "Do it like _before!_ " 

  
"I did." _No, he didn't._

  
He covered his stupid horse teeth with his hand and closed his eyes.  _I want Cole to feel better. I'm sorry for hurting him. It was a mistake. I'm sorry. I want to make him feel better. I'm sorry!_ He slammed his other hand against Cole's chest. So hard that the older boy gave off a slight _oomph_. Fire burned between them. Like lightning against a black sky, everything was illuminated for just an instant. He saw spiderwebs of light scorch themselves across the backs of his eyelids, his mouth was full of ash. His nose was full of the stench of burning rubber. 

  
When he finally let go and released his mouthful of air, he half expected smoldering embers to come out instead. 

  
He blinked back into reality to find Cole staring at him slack-jawed, tissues turned limp in his hand. There was dried blood on his face, sure. But no burns. No swollen nose, no bruises, no black-eye and no cut on his forehead. It was almost like they had never been there at all. 

  
 " _Whoa._ " They whispered at the same time, two pairs of eyes stretched wide as saucers. 

  
He described the whole thing to his mother that night. She sipped her gross watery diner coffee and just listened. He ate pancakes covered in sprinkles and whipped cream. Wearing his plastic toy crown and sunset orange tights under his oversized yellow bumblebee sweater and clunky braces.

  
When he couldn't talk anymore, she leaned over and pressed a kiss to his forehead. 

  
"Mama, am I a _freak?_ " 

  
"No, baby." 

  
"Then why can do the things I can do?" 

  
She paused.

  
"Did you know that there's a type of plankton, little tiny bits of fish, algae and debris in the ocean, that can glow in the dark? It's _bioluminescent._ They're found in the Maldives, on this tiny little island. They call it  _The Sea of Stars."_

  
She had the same far-off look in her eyes that she did when she talked about his father. "Daddy seahorses give birth instead of mommies. Baby turtles are born knowing exactly what they have to do and where they have to go. Then they go back to the same spot to start the cycle all over again.

  
…Sometimes fall leaves change color to orange, sometimes yellow, sometimes red and sometimes not at all.

  
Your father and I, managed to make a perfect little boy and now he's sitting right in front of me." 

  
Her hands cupped his chin and there was no scent of sulfur or burning. 

  
"All those things are _miracles."_ She pressed another kiss to his cheek. "There will always be magic in the world, my little Prince. So enjoy it when and where you find it." 

  
Cole was his _best-friend_ from that day onward. 

  
In every one of his scenes drawn in smudgy pencil or old pastels, there was a new face. A young blonde knight, a yellow dragon, and a sword held aloft beside his own. 

 

  
_Three years_ passed quickly, even faster than those he’d spent in the sanitarium/fever hospital.

  
Three years of pictures with the camera Cole got for his ninth birthday.

  
They used up so many rolls of film that it was hilarious. They never had their pictures on time. It would be months upon months before they got around to getting a recent roll developed and by then it wasn't so recent anymore.

  
Cole's mother would give him free piano lessons every Thursday and Friday, desperate for anyone who was even remotely gifted at it. As Cole, despite his namesake's musical prowess, was as tone-deaf as they came. 

  
Cole’s father loved listening to the music they made together, and even insisted on imparting some special knowledge on the boys himself.

  
He taught them how to _dance_.

  
But not just any kind of dancing, traditional Irish dances that made him feel like his feet were flying.

  
Suddenly the little boy, who’d spent his childhood in heavy cumbersome leg-braces, could keep up and do even better than someone without his painful history or messed-up scarred legs. He suddenly found beauty in a part of himself that he’d always hated, and it was because of Mr. Brennan.

  
He promised to take them both to a Ceili _in Ireland_ when they were older. Where they could dance with more than just him or each other.

  
Luckily, because of Brooklyn’s burgeoning Irish community, they were in a few tiny competitions for step-dance, usually performing together and placing high. It was a running Brennan family joke that Sky was actually more Irish than the lot of them. With his skill in the dances, his ability to pick them up so quickly, that mop-top of jet black curls and porcelain skin envied by most of the dancing girls, he looked more like a boy come fresh from the _Cliffs of Moher_ than a mix of Scandinavian and Persian. Not to mention how quickly he picked up a working knowledge of Irish Gaelic.

  
But when they weren’t in lessons or at school, they were laying sprawled on their bellies in the library, flipping through old musty books and sometimes reading aloud to one another. 

  
Sky's favorites were  _The Scarlet Pimpernel, Little Women, The Grimm Brothers' Fairytales, Alice in Wonderland_  and  _Hans Christian Andersen's Fairytales and Stories._  

  
Cole's were  _Dracula, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Edgar Allen Poe's Complete Works, Carrie_ and  _'Salem's Lot_. 

  
He was pretty sure half of Cole's horror obsession was rooted in trying to understand Sky and his assorted oddities. Or his  _Gifts_ as his mother and Cole liked to call them. 

  
One afternoon, as they were flopped on the floor next to each other, legs kicked up and resting on the shelves. Fingers intertwined where nobody else could see, behind the stacks where they were by themselves. Cole regaled him with yet another half-baked theory. 

  
"What if you're a _witch!"_

  
Sky couldn't help but laugh out-loud, but because it was a library, he tried to be quiet by just snorting into his free palm. 

  
"No, _really!"_ Cole squawked indignantly, waving his free hand around emphatically. "What if that's why you can heal and see dead people! _Sky, you're downright spooky!_ You gotta be!" He looked over eagerly, probably hoping to see a revelation dawning in his best-friend's eyes, instead what he saw was the younger boy practically dying of his own withheld laughter. 

  
"Rhys..." He whined, plaintively, but the boy in question could only grin impishly. 

  
"Sorry, Cole..." He hiccuped through his muffled laughter. "That sounds groovy and everything, but this isn't an episode of  _Bewitched!_ " 

  
He snickered again and Cole stuck out his tongue to blow him a raspberry.  

  
Sky wasn't exactly sure when his feelings for Cole became more than just best-friend feelings.

  
He knew that Cole was a boy and that a lot of people didn't like it when boys had feelings for other boys. But what he felt for his best-friend didn't feel like a bad thing. It was good. It felt warm and happy and safe.

  
They didn't hold hands until they were by themselves. But he was pretty sure his mother knew, she just didn't mind it. She would look at them fondly as they played buck-buck and stickball with the neighborhood kids and spent all night talking together afterwards, flopping onto and cramming into their one mattress, like sardines in a can.

  
She was just happy he was loved. 

  
Cole's parents likely suspected something as well. But Mrs. Brennan still gave Sky free piano lessons with a genuine silky smile on her face and Mr. Brennan would still eagerly teach them both how to play soccer, as well as dance.

  
Then they would have weekend tournaments. Mr. Brennan would race over and sweep both of them up into his hairy arms when he wanted to score without little feet getting in the way. Sky so often shrieked with joy and childhood abandon in those days, as he was held over the stocky Irishman's shoulder for so long that his blood whooshed loudly in his ears. 

  
He was _loved._  

  
It didn't matter by who, or what, it just mattered that it happened. _He was loved_. 

  
Then predictably… everything all went to shit.

  
_Rhye fell,_ and there was absolutely nothing he could do about it. 

  
" _Ah, then came man to savage in the night_  
_To run like thieves and to kill like knives_  
_To take away the power from the magic hand_  
_To bring about the ruin to the promised land, aah, aah..."_

  
_Sudden. Cardiac. Death._

  
Those were the three words a kind-eyed grandfatherly doctor told him at the hospital. His birthday was in just two days. He was turning nine on January 1st and wanted to see the smoggy sky full of lights once again, to see the ball drop in Time Square. But what did it matter...

  
Now that his whole world was dead and gone? 

  
He'd been playing with Cole out in the snow that day, New York City was beautiful in the wintertime. 

  
While he was making snow-angels, his mother had collapsed to the thinly carpeted floor of their studio apartment. As his little hands packed together fluffy snowballs with the same kind of pressure she likely felt in her chest, her heart beat erratically. He and Cole caught snow flurries on their tongues and compared the shapes caught in their soft mittened hands, while his mother's heart stopped. He remembered blinking up at the overcast snowy sky above and grinning a toothy smile. While his mother's organs stopped getting oxygen and the tissues died. 

  
By the time ash filled his mouth and hellfire blazed beneath his skin, it was too late. 

  
He was up and running towards the apartment without even a word to Cole, who chased after him, calling his name with concern alight in those Emerald Isle eyes. Shadows were flickering in the corners of Sky's vision, and the present ghosts were all staring at him solemnly, even the spirits he had considered his friends. Their sadness was strangling him and he could barely breathe. Their hands reached for him, sporting vast empty holes where eyes would've gone. For the first time, he was genuinely afraid. 

  
_Your mother, your mother, your mother, your mother..._

  
Their whispers followed him like a burial shroud. No matter how fast he ran, he couldn't escape them. 

  
“ _Prince Rhye? Rhys?_ Jesus, _what's wrong?!_ " Cole yelled, forgetting just how fast Sky was without the braces and crutches. The snow was far too heavy to run through. "What did you see?! _Sky!"_  He screeched. 

  
Sky raced up the steps of his apartment building, nearly slipping over the edge numerous times and giving Cole mini heart-attacks as he did so. He threw open his front door and then...

  
Everything went horribly, frighteningly, devastatingly...  _quiet._

  
_"They turn the milk into sour_  
_Like the blue in the blood of my veins_  
_Why can't you see it?_  
_Fire burning in hell with the cry of screaming pain!_  
_Son of heaven set me free and let me go..._

 _Sea turn dry, no salt from sand,_  
_Seasons fly no helping hand,_  
_Teeth don't shine like pearls for poor man's eyes, aah..."_

  
There were fireworks on his birthday. The ball dropped in Time Square.

  
Just like every year, no matter what happened in his life, there was always a party. 

  
That just happened to be the morning his mother was buried. 

  
The snow held no joy for him anymore. The sky was gray, the ground was white and his heart was somewhere beneath the frozen dirt. The only reason he got through the miserable funeral at all, was the feeling of Cole's arms around him, Mrs. Brennan humming _Für Elise_ under her breath, and Mr. Brennan scooping him up to carry him out of the graveyard like small child. He buried his face in the Irishman's stubbly neck and Mr. Brennan just rubbed his back sadly, whispering the story of _Tír na nÓg._

  
Sky had just assumed that he would be with them afterwards. 

  
The Brennans were not _rich_ by any means, they all lived in the poor Irish/Immigrant bit of Brooklyn, but they had more than enough to feed another mouth. They had a place in their hearts for another son. A place in their modest home. A place in their lives.

  
They'd already taken him in, both mentally and physically, during that first night in the hospital. When it was confirmed that Birdy Rhodes had left this world.  

  
But it was not to be. 

  
_Social Services_ came a-knocking on the very night of his birthday. To inform them all of its lovely archaic practices, which dictated that it didn't matter how much the Brennans wanted to take care of Sky. Or how much Cole didn't want to lose his best-friend _(and perhaps more)._

  
_I_ t simply read that if there was a living parent, the care of the child had to go to their living parent. And if that parent was somehow unfit, then it would take a miracle for him to be placed with them again. A miracle that would take years to come to fruition. 

  
What that meant was, on the day after his birthday and the burial of his mother, Sky would be torn from their lives like a misplaced postage stamp. All packaged up and put on a plane to another country, where he would then be dumped on the father he'd never met. Who didn't even know he _existed_. They didn't see any issues with that at all. 

  
Sky, or Rhye as his social-worker insisted on calling him, who was oft a well-behaved child _(Ha!)_ unless pressed the wrong way, screamed and wailed like a banshee as he was dragged away from the Brennans and everything he knew. 

  
Tiny, puffy-eyed, wearing rumpled hand-me-down pajamas and his current favorite toy crown gifted to him by Cole the night before, paired with an acidic scowl. 

  
He refused to change when prompted and buried his face in his single overfilled rucksack whenever given a command. 

  
His caseworker tried to placate him the whole flight, giving him snacks and little crafts to do.  _Write down everything you want your father to know about you, sweetheart! Make him a little card!_ But to no avail. He'd never even left New York City, let alone been on a plane and he couldn't even bring himself to enjoy the experience. It was horrifying. Not even drawing or the smell of a few Brennan shirts that he'd borrowed could make things any better. He was like a small boat drifting away from his moorings. Something untethered to the earth or to anything at all. 

  
_You could've healed her if you'd been there._ His inner voice chastised him mercilessly.  _What's the use of having a Gift like that if you can’t even save the ones you love? If you can't even save yourself?_

  
He spent the night at _the American Embassy_ in London, sleeping on a few uncomfortable chairs pushed together to make some sort of semblance of a bed.

  
The officials were trying to get in contact with his father. Something made remarkably difficult by the fact that he was a celebrity and a deathly private celebrity at that. Who had body guards and people trained specifically to avoid the paparazzi and crazy fans at all costs. 

  
He cried himself to sleep that night, jet-lagged and sick with grief. Wishing he was back in New York City, on his shitty shared mattress but still held tight in his mother's gentle embrace.  _I love you, my little Prince Rhye._ _I love you so much._

  
Not even singing to himself helped. He just cried even harder.

 

It felt strange not to take solace in the few emotions he understood, like indignation and anger. 

  
" _Someone, someone has drained the colour from my wings..._  
_Broken my fairy circle ring_  
_And shamed the king in all his pride_  
_Changed the winds and wronged the tides..._

 _Mother Mercury... Mercury..._  
_Look what they've done to me!_  
_I cannot run, I cannot hide..."_

  
Nothing was _right_ anymore, everything was broken into bits and no matter how hard he tried to put them back together again, it was to no avail. 

  
It was _incurably eviscerated._

  
_His life and his heart._

  
All Sky could do was _cry._

 

 


	2. Father to Son (January 1976)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sky's a scared mess and Freddie's hopeless. 
> 
>  
> 
> This is why Mary exists. :)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Featured is Queen's "Father to Son" and a quote on Banshees from: "The Banshee| Kelden".

_"A word in your ear, from father to son_  
_Hear the word that I say_  
_I fought with you, fought on your side_  
_Long before you were born..."_

 

 

 

  
The morning didn't bring much relief. 

  
Sky was a child of music, with a soundtrack to his life playing in his head at every moment.

 

That didn't mean his music would save him though, not from the pain and certainly not from the shattered bits of his heart that still remained lodged up in his chest. It felt like a ball of broken glass shards rolling around in there. Every time he took a breath, it ached something fierce. 

  
His mother's absence was a _visceral_ thing. 

  
Even when he, a champion pretender in his own right, closed his eyes and imagined her there... He was still left _bereft_. His body already knew what his mind loathed to admit. And he felt her loss like an invisible illness, one he couldn’t hope to heal. 

  
He scrubbed at his closed eyes with his oversized pajama sleeves pulled over his fists to soften them. He was cold, but the biting sensation kept him in the present. 

  
The pajamas were these horrid heavy green things, Cole's first no doubt because they smelled like him and Sky's own cheap paints, made from material akin to that of a musty afghan. His black curly mess of hair was everywhere, stuck to the faux fabric of the uncomfortable embassy chairs, tangled up in his toy crown, even pinning his fingers together like a Chinese Finger Trap. Cole loved his worthless mop, the blonde with his fine hair and barely-there-waves, treated Sky's hair like it was his own personal pillow. One that smelled of drugstore strawberry shampoo and was always a giant frizzy-fluffy hurricane because they could never afford the special products made for curly hair. 

  
He smiled, despite himself, forgetting for a moment as he remembered he and his mother’s aptly-named,  _Brush Wars_. 

  
His mother, who despite having the same corkscrew curls as him, ones that stuck out horizontally instead of growing down like normal hair, also had relatively normal-to-fine texture. He got the same curl type, but with a fluffy impossible thickness that could only be attributed to his Persian puffball of a father. It was the worst of both worlds. Hair that _refused to be tamed_ in any way. 

  
Brushes _worked_ for his mother. 

  
She'd have to tear out every other row of bristles and be certain to detangle her frizz while it was wet, but the brushes still worked _wonders_ on her hair. 

  
While in contrast, brushes were his worst enemy. 

  
His hair was the kind of hair that surviving brushes told horror stories about to other brushes at night. One brief snarl through a fistful of his hair was enough to snap off the end of the brush entirely. Like it was made of nothing at all. _Snap. Snap. Snap_. A bit like cries of pain as they filled the bathroom wastebasket. 

  
_Brush Wars_  was a game that his mother had invented. She was _convinced_ that she could find something to detangle his hair with, well, _eventually_. Brushes bit the dust more often than not. Combs tended to get lost in his mane. _(Along with a number two pencil, three paint brushes and a couple hair-ties who already lived in there)_. Every time they had a little bit of money left over from rent and utilities, she would buy a new thing to try. 

  
Even if it didn't work, they usually got a good laugh out of it. 

  
His heart sunk when he realized she would never find the perfect hair tool for his incorrigible locks. She would never win at  _Brush Wars_. She would never kiss him on the forehead again, smearing his soft skin with her sweet black cherry lipstick. Never smooth her hands over his head to shape his flyaway curls again, never take another breath. He bit his bottom lip so hard, that it hurt almost at much as his heart did. _Almost._ It seemed his horse teeth were good for something after all. 

  
Also _apparently_ his father still hadn't been contacted, even after hours upon hours of attempts, and with no other possible option for the _American Child Service_ 's grand-plan for him...

  
He found himself being dragged to his feet and bustled out into the still vaguely-busy streets of London, despite it being only the wee hours of the morning. 

  
His entire life could be found compressed into a single lonesome backpack, so he buried his face into it once again in the cab, clinging desperately to the one thing he still had. 

  
_'Why are you so sad, Sunshine?'_

  
The little girl had coiffed auburn hair under a yellow hat and couldn't have been more than seven or six. Her clothes were all dusty, just like her face and hands, and her eyelids and lips were a bruised blue-purple. She was standing in front of him, well, between his legs and the seat in front of him. _'Do you want to come play with us?'_

  
She motioned to an alley as they passed, with lots of other dusty children milling about. _Ghost children_ , who watched the cab and he himself with rapt attention. He shook his head, _'maybe later'_ he mouthed and she understood. 

  
' _I'm Maryellen.'_

  
He smiled for her, despite the ache, and extended a hand. As she brushed it with her own, he felt a flash of her death. Collapsing walls, the ground shaking beneath her feet, dust and the muted coughs of other children, before they all screamed. ' _There were bombs outside._ ' She told him softly, with too much knowledge in her young eyes. ' _They brought us somewhere to hide underneath the floor. But then everything fell down on top of us.'_

  
_I'm sorry,_ he tried to convey with his eyes and the way he grasped her hand. Solid to him, incorporeal to everyone else. 

  
"Rhye, love? Are you alright?" 

  
He snatched his hand back, the very moment his caseworker spoke to him. A simple strained nod in her direction and then he was back to hiding his face away again. She sighed. 

  
"He's probably _not half-bad,_ you know." She tried, almost soothing. "He's _private, yes_. And a few...  _other things_ that the tabloids _love_ to report. But I'm sure he's a nice enough fellow, when given the chance! Surely your mother didn't mean to keep you two apart this long... She _must've_ loved him, once." 

  
"She still did." He mumbled, just loud enough for her to catch. "She didn't think he was a bad person or anything. But they were young and stupid, and she knew how much his music meant to him. He wouldn't have been able to do all his _Queen_ stuff while changing diapers and raising a baby." Now that he was old enough to take care of himself, he _really didn't need anybody_ after all.  _(He sounded bitter, even to his own ears)._

  
_His father had been her first love. But the guy probably didn't even remember her._

  
_Mama, where are you? What's the point of seeing the lost if I can't see you?_

  
_100 Holland Road_ looked like some of the nicest houses on the outskirts of New York City, houses that were sandwiched by other nice houses like the creamy filling inside an Oreo cookie. Being far taller than it was wide. Apparently his father had lived there a good long while. Complete with a new burgeoning staff cycling through and a long-term partner in Mary Austin. He couldn't really make out the decor of the house in the still prevailing darkness, but he could see the rough outline of a wire mesh balcony supported by two classy white columns. It was _pretty._

  
Unlike the man who opened the door with _a whine,_ squinting out into the darkness. Wearing little more than some silky boxers and a fire-red kimono like an open bathrobe. 

  
"Look, _please_ don't be burglars." His father sighed, dramatically. "Or if you are, come back once the sun's out, _yes?_ You can have my Victorian tea set, I won't even fight you for the china, just please...  _sleep_." He moaned, plaintively, slumping against the door frame with one arm above his head. 

  
Man, the guy was  _hairy_. His chest and pits were like a nightmare forest come to life. Was that what _he_ had to look forward to when puberty finally hit? To look like a _shag carpet?_

  
His caseworker remained professional however, not even bothered by the sight of a drowsy, bedraggled, sleep-rumpled _Freddie Mercury_. Who looked like he really needed that beauty rest after all. She sharply cleared her throat instead and extended a thick manila folder out to him. The rockstar took it with a sleepy scowl, his brain not quite processing what was in front of him.

  
"What's _this_ then? Are you from _the HMRC?"_

  
He squinted at the folder like either it held all the answers to the universe, or the function of the metal clasp was evading him. 

  
"No, _Mr. Bulsara_ , I am not. I'm here regarding-"

  
"Mercury." 

  
"I... _What?_ " She looked to be at a loss from the interruption. 

  
"My _name_. It's _Mercury_ , Freddie  _Mercury_. It has been for years." He replied, testily. "You'd think the HMRC would know that." 

  
His caseworker looked like she'd shaved a good ten years off her life with a single conversation.  "Mr.  _Mercury_  then. I'm not with the HMRC, I'm with the American Embassy in London-" 

  
" _America? Ha!_ What does America want with me? Pretty sure our records don't even sell there anyway. Not as well as they do here." He rubbed a hand through his poofy bedhead. "Listen, _Ms. America_ , we're meant to be touring there in a few weeks anyway, you can save your questions for me then, _yeah? Goodnight_." He half-closed the door and Sky's caseworker shoved her black stiletto in there like a goddamned doorstop. His respect for her increased ten-fold. 

  
"Mr. _Mercury_ , I'm here regarding an old partner of yours by the name of _Roberta Rhodes_." Her voice was sharp and clipped like the wings of a parakeet. 

  
"Doesn't ring a bell." 

  
"Well, _Ms. Rhodes_ died recently of an undiagnosed heart condition." Everything about the conversation was stiff and cold between them. 

  
"Tragic." His father really didn't sound all that broken up about it, and the badger scowl seemed to become a permanent fixture of his face. "I'll send some flowers." 

  
"There's no need for any fuss. Ms. Rhodes was only survived by a single child, a son. Born in New York City, 1967, about _nine months_ after the two of you became well-acquainted at _Isleworth Polytechnical school_. You left soon afterwards for Ealing, yes?" Freddie had gone dead silent, doe brown eyes wide and an easy grip turned white-knuckled on both the door and its frame. All signs of weariness had left him. 

  
"She named him  _Rhye Halley Bulsara_ , after his biological father: _Farrokh Bulsara_ , but often called _Freddie._ The name still present on both his birth certificate and her last will and testament, copies are in that folder you're holding. Although I suppose it should be _Rhye Halley Mercury_ , now wouldn't it? Oh, would you like to begin those proceedings as well, _Mr. Mercury?"_  

  
Sky got to see his father's teeth in real life then, as he stood there slack-jawed, before they tightened. 

  
"Look, _darling._ " He said when he'd managed to gather himself, eyes burning bright, spitting through gritted teeth. 

  
"I don't know who this _Rhodes woman_ is, or the child she's _claiming_ is mine. _I have no children!_ Clearly she was just a fan with some sort of _mental issue_ and unfortunate enough to be left by the true father of her child. That's _it_ , end of story. I want _my name off this certificate_ and _off of this problem._ You shall be hearing from my lawyers shortly, _Ms. America!"_  

  
He tried to shut the door again and Sky felt his stomach plummet through the floor. 

  
"Your blood type is B- according to your existing medical documentation filed with the British Government. Rhye's is AB- and his mother's was A-. In order to create an AB- child with an A- woman you would have to be B-, B+(-) or AB-, AB+(-). Considering AB- is the rarest blood type in the human race, it doesn't happen all that often. That already puts you at quite the paternity advantage, Mr. Mercury. We also have access to serological testing, comparing proteins in the blood and another test through HLA, which could take up to year to get results from, and involves a copious amount of blood drawn. Is that something you would be _interested in, Mr. Mercury?"_  

  
Once again, his father was left flabbergasted, only angrier this time. "This is _crazy!_ I'm _not a father! I can't be!_ This has to be a _mistake!"_  

  
_A mistake._

  
_"Kings will be crowned, and the word goes around_  
_From father to son, to son..."_

  
He was nine years old. His mother was dead. He was in a foreign country with people he didn't know and the man he'd abstractly considered his father his whole life, the man he'd grown up listening to in some weak bid to understand... Didn't even _want_ him. Considered him _a mistake_. 

  
_Are you all that surprised?_   The tiny vicious voice within him, whispered. _Really? He’s a famous rockstar, he could have a dozen other children born out of wedlock. What makes you so special? Scarred, half-dead, always working freakish miracles you can’t control or understand, all of it burning at your fingertips like a lit fuse... You know, they used to burn people like you here…_

  
_Called them **witches.**_

  
_Cole was right... And you’d deserve it too. Couldn’t even save the one person who loved you most of all._

  
_Why do you **deserve** a second chance?_

  
Sky felt like the clumsy stitches holding his heart's broken ball of bits together, _popped open_. Sending shrapnel flying everywhere. Piercing all his vital organs, draining them of blood until there was nothing left.

  
He burst into _devastated_ tears. 

  
Fat hot wretched tears, that fell from his face into the white steps below and these heartbreaking hiccuping sobs that made him sound far younger than he was. He wrapped his skinny arms around his torso like he was hugging himself, for some small modicum of comfort. He was cold and scared and hungry and just wanted to go home. He wanted _his Mama!_ He couldn’t even dredge up his usual anger or indignation to deflect the feelings somewhere far away.

  
The door _instantly_ swung open all the way, flooding the whole front stoop with bright light, and his father _looked_ at him for the first time. _Genuinely looked_ at him. Standing in the cold, clad in too-big pajamas, big black hair in disarray with the sparkly crown not helping in the slightest, tears rolling down his cheeks and bruised black circles around his eyes from the sheer lack of rest. _Pathetic. Pitiful._ He was shivering. 

  
They just looked at each other for a moment, before Freddie rounded on his caseworker. 

  
"You _brought him with you?!_ It's _freezing_ out and in _the middle of the bloody night!_ " 

  
"You weren't answering any calls." 

  
"He's a _grieving child!_ He looks like someone's gone and punched him in the face with those raccoon eyes! Is..." His father was peering at him like he was a subject under study and he felt his cheeks color pink. "Is that _rucksack_ all he has with him? _Truly!?_ Oh God, he's in _pajamas!"_  

  
Like a magnificent swooping bird of prey, the young man marched right across the threshold, kimono fluttering behind him like a cape, and scooped Sky up like he weighed next to nothing at all. He whimpered thinly, at the sudden shock of rapid position change, but was paid no mind. Freddie then tossed back a scathing look at Sky's caseworker, as he carried his son inside. 

  
"Yes, well. Thank you for the hand delivery! And they say _storks don't bring babies_... you’ve certainly shown them. _Goodnight!”_  

  
He slammed the door shut in her face, her foot had blessedly moved, lest it be trapped in the same way once more. 

  
His father smelled like flowery perfume, old cigarettes and expensive fabric softener. He buried his nose in the surprisingly strong man's shoulder and held on with everything he had. 

  
"Representatives from our office will be by to check on you both periodically!" His caseworker called, her voice muffled through the fancy door. 

  
_No, they wouldn't._

  
_He was nine, not stupid. He knew nobody gave a shit about him or where he ended up._

  
"Thank you, _Ms. America!_ You can leave now, dear! _Get off my fucking property!"_ Freddie sing-songed, anger barely held back in his overtly saccharine voice.

  
Once they heard the telltale click-clacking of stiletto heels exiting off the terrace, the grip on him softened, and he slid down until he was standing on his own two feet once more.

  
Blinking blankly up at his father, who looked to be at a complete and utter loss, the bags rather prominent under his eyes, mirrors of his own. Even the sun wasn't awake yet, so he simply reached up and slid his smaller hand into his father's.

  
His nails were lacquered black on that hand and it was _warm_ , the good kind of warm, it was _nice_. He walked them both over to the nearest room, with a fancy haute couture couch in the middle. Honestly, it was probably the most expensive couch Sky had ever seen, with crushed velvet upholstery and carved lion's feet supporting it. 

  
He firmly but gently, pushed his father onto it. 

  
The young man slumped down obediently, something that Sky attributed more to being lost and tired, than purely agreeable by nature.

  
Sky climbed up after him, buried his face in his father's fuzzy bare chest and was out like a light. 

  
-X-

  
" _I've got it!"_  

  
Cole told him once again, on a sunshiny throwaway day, flipping through a dusty book of Celtic mythology.

  
Sky raised a single eyebrow in question, but his best-friend was already twisting the book around to show him an old inky picture of a crying, screaming ghost woman. "A  _bean síghe! A banshee!"_

  
He then spun it back around, grinning and rescanning the text. "My Mam swears by this! She says that they're special spirits who follow certain families and can sense when death is coming, so they scream and cry to warn them and to mourn. According to this, they can also appear as washerwomen, washing the bloody rags of someone about to die. It's all about _death.._." His voice trailed off. 

  
"Anything about _healing?_ And wouldn't being a banshee make me a spirit myself?"

  
Sky sighed at yet another one of Cole's conspiracy theories, poking holes into it as he went. 

  
"I dunno... Maybe you're just _related to one?_ Or they got some parts of it wrong?" He pursed his lips, thinking. "Maybe a part of seeing the deaths is _preventing them?_ And um, sometimes mourning can heal broken hearts… and if you know how someone is going to die, couldn't you _fix it_ beforehand?" 

  
"If it can be fixed..." 

  
Sky had bitten his lip and looked away, lost in thought. There had been a prayer in that book, one that he still remembered, years later:  

  
_"Darkness has fallen and sadness surrounds..._  
_I call out to you, Faerie Woman of the Mound,_  
_You’re the harbinger of death, the ghastly Bean-Sidhe,_  
_In the dead of night, you appear now to me,_

 _I hear your screams of dreadful grief,_  
_My cries join with yours as I search for relief,_  
_I wail in lament of my poor broken heart,_  
_You stand by my side as it all falls apart,_

 _I shriek and I yell,_  
_I beat my fists upon the ground,_  
_As the bitter winds of change rise up all around,_  
_As death wraps around me,_  
_and devours and reaps,_  
_And takes away the old and what I can no longer keep,_

 _On and on until all the pain is gone,_  
_Carried away by my Banshee song..."_

-X-

 _"Joyful the sound, the word goes around_  
_From father to son, to son..._  
_And the voice is so clear, time after time it keeps on_  
_Calling you, calling you on_

 _Don't destroy what you see, your country to be_  
_Just keep building on the ground that's been won..."_

 

Sky woke up when his human pillow shifted, or well,  _tried_ to shift. 

  
He had his tiny hands threaded and clenched through his father's black licorice forest of chest hair so... _yeah_. The poor man was not escaping anytime soon. But he was almost shocked into opening his eyes when the crystalline assuredly-feminine voice spoke. Too close. Her voice sounded like _Tinkerbell's._ A stranger.

  
"...He's so _small._ How old did you say he was?" 

  
A featherlight touch brushed against his cheek and he resisted the urge to sneeze. 

  
"I honestly don't remember, darling... _Eight? Nine?_ Not much older..." 

  
His father's voice rumbled in his chest like the hum of an old car engine, it was strangely soothing. Lulling him back into the tranquility of sleep. 

  
"He seems so much younger though, physically. Maybe five or six? Do you think he's had enough to eat? I was putting away his things in the guest room and all his clothes seem so much bigger than he is. The little he has anyway..."

  
He bristled at that, her implying that his mother had neglected him. She certainly had not! She'd done her best! And the reason those clothes were so big were because most of them were _Cole's!_ Just having those items near, made him feel better about being in a different country with a whole bunch of strangers. Without his mother, his only anchor to this odd planet.

  
The woman let out a small sigh before a hesitant, "Did you _love her,_ Freddie?" 

  
His father paused, but there were colors in the silence. Sky saw the vibrant pink of a fresh sunset playing on the backs of his eyes. A flamingo's wings. A fresh bottle of Pepto Bismal. 

  
The stinging guilt of not quite remembering her. It tasted like the ash of healing on his tongue.

  
"I sincerely hope so, she obviously loved me."  _Enough to have my son,_ he didn't say. He didn't have to. 

  
"...With all that hair he could be Bri's. Are you sure they got the right Queen member?" Her tone was light, teasing. 

  
But he felt a big warm hand, his father's, go to one of his front curls and  _boing_  it. A few of them actually. In quick succession.

  
"Well, yes. But I _must_ remember to ask Mags about his hair-care routine and products... These shouldn't be quite so frizzy and undefined." 

  
There was one particular curl _pop_ that had him made a sound akin to a small kitten's harassed mew and snuggle deeper into his father. The chest hair tickled his nose and he heard his father make a deep strangled, cut-off noise, deep inside his fuzzy torso. 

  
"My god, he's _adorable!_ " The young man desperately whispered, sounding gutted. “…Mary, darling, I'm  _doomed_." 

  
Her laugh sounded like tinkling bells, not unlike her clear sweet bell of a voice as it echoed in his ears. Ripples in a sterling silver pond. 

  
-X-

  
_"Take this letter that I give you_  
_Take it sonny, hold it high_  
_You won't understand a word that's in it_  
_But you'll write it out again before you die..."_

  
He woke up again a few hours later, and gently extricated himself from his father's teddy-bearlike grip. 

  
The campy rockstar looked a lot less pretty and put-together when he was fast asleep. 

  
All half-open mouth breathing and frightful bedhead, with fingers that reached out and twitched, as if playing the piano in his dreams. 

  
A young blonde woman was asleep in a fancy chair across from them, her long straight cornsilk hair was half-splayed across her face and her silky pink pearl robe was falling down her shoulders, revealing a white chiffon nightie beneath. Her long cream-colored legs were curled up beneath her and she looked mighty uncomfortable, but still lost in her dreams. Probably the Mary that his father had named before. 

  
Oh! _Mary Austin_ , clarity dawned on him.

  
He'd seen her name and picture in the tabloids a few times before with his father. But he tended to avoid most of the raunchier ones to feature them, as knowing rumors about his father's sex life wasn't exactly on the agenda.

  
So Sky just padded around in his bare feet until he found the kitchen. 

  
It was a nice kitchen, decently sized and full of newly bought fancy appliances. 

  
He was more concerned with what was inside them, however. Digging around in the refrigerator until he found some chocolate chips, strawberries, Hershey kisses from milk to match his eye, eggs, butter and milk. The flour, brown sugar and baking powder he dug out of the pantry. Then he set about making the pancakes. 

  
Sky dragged over a heavy wooden chair from the marble island and stood on it delicately, in order to unearth a fossilized mixing bowl from the cabinets high above his head. Then he found a whisk and a wooden spoon, to go with the frying pan he planned to use as a makeshift pancake griddle.

  
The stove took a little more fiddling and ingenuity, but he managed it. Heating the pan as he sifted together all the dry ingredients before dumping in the wet. He had to sit criss-crossed on the floor, holding the bowl between his thighs to secure it as he stirred with all his might. As if beating the ingredients into submission. 

  
The chocolates and strawberries he added to the batter last, as he had to squish and squeeze the strawberries into bits by hand, before putting them in the mixture. _(Mama said he wasn't allowed to use a knife by himself till he was ten)._

  
He heated the pan until it was sizzling hot on the stove. 

  
Sky had to stand on the chair again to do it. But he wasn't afraid of falling down, even when the heavy chair rocked back and forth, precariously.

  
He couldn't find the metal spoons or measuring cups, so he used his hands to scoop up a ball of batter and drop it on the pan. 

  
He would monitor it, until bubbles formed on the batter, then he knew it was time to flip. He used the wooden spoon to flip it since he couldn't find the spatula either. But he liked improvising. 

  
The little boy counted to sixty, before removing the pancake and plopping it down on a plate. Then he started on the next one. 

  
" _A word in your ear from father to son_  
_Funny you don't hear a single word I say_  
_But my letter to you will stay by your side_  
_Through the years till the loneliness is gone_  
_Sing if you will - but the air you breathe I live to give you..."_

  
He knew Brian May wrote the song, but he'd always listened to his father singing it and imagined that it was written just for him. That _it_ was his letter. He knew every word and sang it with his girly voice and the soft lisp his bulky teeth provided.

  
As he filled the plates with chocolate-strawberry pancakes, the kind he used to make with the Brennans and his Mama. 

  
Only now there was no Cole to smash flour into his hair or to steal all the Hershey kisses, squirreling them into his pockets or his mouth.

  
There was _just Sky,_ who yearned to see the ghost of his mother, that _still_ wasn't there. He knew she wouldn't be there, she would never be there. She wasn't earthbound. But he looked anyway. The duty of a lost child. _No Cole. No mother. No New York City. No Brennans. No record shop. No rough and tumble-block-kids to play with. No school. No anything at all._

  
He was utterly and completely, lost. Untethered.

  
It took two different trips to carry all the pancake plates to the table. Unsure as to whether or not they were supposed to eat on the fancy tablecloth.

  
But he put them down anyway. 

  
He turned back to go get his father and Mary, when he was stopped by a loud _meow_ and a small body pressed up against his covered legs. The first thing to come out of his mouth was a _coo_ , as he reached down to gather up his new friend into his arms. The little cat had orangey fur that stuck out in every direction and big clear eyes that stared up into his own with curiosity and wonder.

  
For an instant it was like the kitten  _knew_. Then a tiny paw reached up to bat at his enormous hair floof. Or maybe it was just the vicious beast on his head that attracted this little _Nemean lion._  

  
"Hello, new friend..." Sky whispered, smiling with his whole body. He pressed a little kiss to the fuzzy head of his new pal and the small cat responded by trilling happily and crawling onto his shoulder. The bulk of its small body hiding in his hair and playing with his crown. 

  
He felt his heart warm in his chest, still smiling, feeling his emotions buoyed for the first time since that snowy day. 

  
"I'm glad you like _the hurricane_ , little cat. Cole does too. You can ride up there as long as you'd like. I'd love to give you some breakfast but I'm not exactly sure what you eat… I didn’t see any cat food…” He'd have to ask Freddie. 

  
" _Dad! Mary!_ I made breakfast!"

  
He called, loud as he dared. Lest they react badly to his wakeup call. By the time he padded back to the sitting room, both of them were still asleep in the same positions he'd left them. 

  
He made a beeline for his father first. 

  
Reaching out to gently tousle his loose fluffy hair, trying to urge him into wakefulness. 

  
Instead, the self-professed Persian Popinjay: promptly groaned, rolled over and flipped him off. All in that order. 

  
"Oh bugger off, _Minsy dearest_..."

  
He moaned, curling away from Sky. 

  
So the little boy did the only thing he could do in that situation, leaned down and juicily _licked_ THE Freddie Mercury's face from cleft chin to eyebrow. 

  
The surprised high-pitched shriek that issued from his father was most certainly the stuff of _legends._

  
The young man flung himself up and backwards, scrabbling for purchase on the traction-less velvet couch, fluffy hair standing up in every direction, kimono wrinkled and spittle dripping agonizingly slowly from one cheek. He blinked over at Sky, incredulously. The small boy had jumped back and fallen onto his bottom in the shuffle, but he practically beamed back at his father with his funky teeth on full-view.

  
The tiny orange tabby on his head squeaked in offense and but then agreeably curled back up again. Giving Sky free-license to laugh his butt off. Which he did, loudly, and was soon joined by Mary, who was privy to the same sight. 

  
"Did you just...  _lick me?!"_

  
Wow, his Dad really did have _(at least)_ a four octave vocal range.

  
" _Mary!"_ He wailed, ever the drama queen. "Don't you _dare_ laugh!" 

  
But she just kept on laughing, the backtrack to Sky's own peals of uninhibited joy. 

  
"You two are pure _awful!"_ He whined, doing his very best to sound pathetic and garner sympathy, scrubbing at the drying spittle and scowling deeply. " _Horrid little beasts!"_  

  
Sky just turned to see Mary, her gossamer hair pulled over and away from her fairylike elfin features.

  
She was _really pretty._ Even more so when she was laughing. She made him open-mouthed smile with that laugh, that smile, that presence of hers. She almost reminded him of his mother, and it wasn't the blonde hair that did it. It was the atmosphere she had around her, oozing from her very being.

  
Her blue eyes widened like robin's eggs laying in a nest. 

  
" _Freddie!"_ She announced, wondrously, still staring with all her might. "He's got _your smile!"_

  
She didn't say it like it was a bad thing, she said it like his own Mama would have. Like the thick teeth and full lips were a treasured gift, something he should be excited to have. Not a physical flaw, an obvious imperfection, to be hidden away. Still, he shut his mouth with a muffled _clap_ and blushed with muted embarrassment. His eyes turned downcast and he covered his mouth with both hands on reflex. He even felt the tiny tabby in his hair wiggle a bit too. 

  
But his father looked at him a different way just then, with an emotion he couldn't name in those distinctive Godiva eyes. Freddie opened and closed his own mouth a couple of times, then cocked an eyebrow when he peered closer. 

  
"Is that...  _Oscar_  in your hair?" 

  
The tiny orange cat's head popped up at the sound of his name and he mewed his confirmation, before trilling loudly and curling back up again. Purring loud like a motorboat in Sky's ears. 

  
"Oh! Your name is  _Oscar! Hello Oscar!"_  

  
The smile was back again as he reached up to gently rub the sleepy kitten. 

  
Drawing up his knees to his chest, he raised up his eyes as far as they could go. Almost forgetting he had an audience. _Almost._

  
"My name is  _Rhye Halley Bulsara_ , but you can call me _Sky_. Most everybody does. 'Cept for Cole and my Mama, and probably you since I don't think we can talk to cats yet. But yeah, Sky is good. ...Does that work for you too, _Mr. Mercury?"_ Realizing, belatedly, that calling a man you'd just met ' _Dad'_ probably wasn't a good idea while he was coherent. 

  
But the young father winced, as if he'd just been slapped, as if the words had physically hurt him the moment they'd left Sky's mouth. 

  
"Oh darling, _please_ don't call me that!" He started waving his hands around frantically. "Call me _anything else!_ _Freddie, Old Tart, Father, anything.._. Just not that." 

  
Sky acquiesced with a small nod. 

  
" _Papa_ , I made pancakes for you, me and  _Mum Mary._  Would you like some?"

  
He held out a small hand to both of them, _individually_.

  
Watching how Mary's cerulean eyes widened in shock, mouthing the words to herself over and over again:  _Mum Mary, Mum Mary, Mum Mary..._

  
But she did take his hand, rather quickly he might add, a small shy smile twitching to life on her lips. He wasn't sure why he called her that, at the time. Mum was the correct word in Britain, and it certainly wasn't Mama, there would only be one Mama in his life.

 

Her name was _Mary_ and it was obvious that she and his father were together.

  
_Maybe... Maybe he just wanted to endear himself to her a little bit, maybe he just wanted to be loved again._

  
_Her hand was soft and her perfume smelled like lilies of the valley._

  
His father seemed a bit taken aback by the exchange between them, but the three pairs of plaintive eyes staring at him convinced him to take hold of Sky's small hand despite it all. 

  
" _Pancakes_ , you say? What kind?" 

  
"Strawberry and chocolate!" He beamed, flashing his teeth to someone who knew the struggle, and even smiled back.

  
"I'm sorry for using the kitchen without asking... But I promise I'll clean up the mess!" 

  
"That's alright, you can do whatever you please. It's your flat too, _Dovey_." The reply was soft, gentle, as if Freddie wasn't sure what to say. 

  
Sky's mother would've chased him into the kitchen so that they could do the dishes together. Sweeping him up into her arms like he didn't weigh a thing at all, tickling the living daylights out of him. _"My little Prince Rhye!"_

  
He forced himself to swallow down the tears that balled up in his throat. Gritting his teeth hard and blinking past them as he forced a smile to his lips. 

  
_It won't be long before he shuts you away in some boarding school somewhere or dumps you into an American orphanage._

  
_Don't let him see you cry anymore. Don't be such a bother._

  
_Don't be his mistake._

  
_"Kings will be crowned, and the word goes around_  
_From father to son, to son_

 _Won't you hear us sing_  
_Our family song..._

 _Joyful the sound, the word goes around_  
_From father to son, to son..."_

  
Maybe he could pretend that he wasn't already. 

 

 


	3. Bohemian Rhapsody (January 1976)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Meeting the Aunties :) 
> 
> Beryl: John Reid  
> Belisha/Bel: John Deacon  
> Elizabeth/Liz: Roger Taylor  
> Maggie/Mags: Brian May  
> Steve: Mary Austin

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Featuring Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody".

_“Do not stand at my grave and weep,_   
_I am not there, I do not sleep._

_I am in a thousand winds that blow,_   
_I am the softly falling snow._   
_I am the gentle showers of rain,_   
_I am the fields of ripening grain._

_I am in the morning hush,_   
_I am in the graceful rush_   
_Of beautiful birds in circling flight,_   
_I am the starshine of the night._   
_I am in the flowers that bloom,_   
_I am in a quiet room._

_I am in the birds that sing,_   
_I am in each lovely thing._   
_Do not stand at my grave bereft_   
_I am not there. I have not left.”_

― Mary Elizabeth Frye

 

 

 

The pancakes were a hit. 

  
But he wasn't paying much attention to the syrup-slathered mess on his plate.

  
He was too busy watching Mary and Freddie _interact_.

 

It was an easy kind of _familiarity_ between them. _Love_ , Sky would hazard to guess, as his father snatched bits of soppy food off her plate, grinning impishly and waiting to be punished. Usually by a light swat to his bum or a gentle yank of his messy hair. He would squawk like some sort of indignant tropical bird, ruffling his plumage and scowling as uppity as he could. Kind of like a rude flamingo or a peacock.

  
There was no true annoyance or upset, no walking on eggshells or erring to the side of caution. It was simply two people existing in the same place at the same time, orbiting around the same planet. It was _beautiful_. And his fingers ached to capture it on the pages of his sketchbook. 

  
They looked really _happy_ , it was nice to see that in someone besides the Brennans. 

  
Like it existed outside of fairytales.

  
Suffice to say that, _well._.. his mother's own brief boyfriends hadn't been _the best_. 

  
She'd never attracted the right kind of men, being a poor white single mother in a low-class immigrant neighborhood and all, but they never lasted longer than a month or two. He _almost_ never saw them, she liked to keep those two worlds separate. Didn't want to expose him to the less-than-savory characters who found their way into her life and into her bed. It was no wonder she held so tightly to the faded memories of his father. He was kind, gentle, sweet, in her mind. Everything the boyfriends weren't. 

  
He was six years old the first time he saw one of them _hit_ his mother. 

  
There was little more he could do besides climb into her lap as she huddled up on the floor of their kitchenette. The boyfriend had been thrown out on the spot, but she was left with blood oozing from her split lip and five-fingered shame burned into the supple skin of her cheek. He took those away with a tiny kiss to her forehead and a balmy touch. But he couldn't spirit away the emotional damage that lingered. 

  
He was eight years old the first time he truly became _collateral._  

  
_(Being punished “properly” had started earlier at their hands, most of them had been taught to fear the belt or switch and made sure that if he messed up in front of them, he caught it too. Another reason his mother tried her best to keep them away)._

  
Sky _wouldn't_ let his mother be hurt anymore, even if it meant being thrown against the wall so hard he cracked several ribs. Yelling back and healing up the damage, had never worked anyhow. 

  
He had to explain it away to Cole and the Brennans by claiming that he'd fallen down the iron-wrought stairs up to their apartment. But he knew they didn't believe him. They never did. He slept over at their house a lot more after that, at their insistence. Even though, after that night, his mother didn't bring home boyfriends anymore. It was just the two of them. He liked it better like that anyhow.

  
Sky was startled from his thoughts as another furry body leapt into his lap. 

  
This one was a chubby brown tabby who proceeded to nuzzle his chest and meow plaintively. A seal-blue shorthair with enormous eyes soon climbed up there as well. Quietly kneading his legs and curling up there. Both of them jostling for space, while Oscar catnapped on his hair and shoulder. He was warm, happy and beamed at his new friends.

  
Freddie himself just blinked at the rather unorthodox scene, before rolling his milk chocolate eyes to the sky and exclaiming: "Oh dear! He's gone and bloody converted Tom and Jerry as well!" Mary tossed her hair and laughed. 

  
While Sky became a human cat-tree and couldn't bring himself to mind it. 

  
" _Sky,_ " Mary began, but he was too busy rubbing Tom's purring back to pay attention. At least, at first. "I work at a store called _Biba._ Maybe you and I could go there later today and pick you out some new outfits? Would you like that?" She smiled and reached for him. But he smiled with too many teeth and shook his head. 

  
"No thank you, Mum Mary. I'm fine with what I have now." 

  
Wrapped up in too-big clothes that smelled like Cole and the Brennans. He blinked his butterfly lashes a few times, but Mary was undeterred. Her hand cupped his cheek, the edges curling under his jawline to lift his face. Her blue eyes met his own and he could see her surprise upon genuinely studying the oddities of his irises. 

  
" _Fine_ isn't _happy_." She whispered, as her other hand pushed a few errant curls away from his forehead. "Consider it an _early birthday_ present from Freddie and I." She looked even closer, observing the starbursts etched across his mismatched eyes. "And may I say, you have the most _beautiful eyes_ I've ever seen. You certainly didn't get those from this old tart." She teased lightly, letting him go. But he was more in shock about what she'd said before. 

  
 _Unusual, yes._ When people wanted to put it kindly. _Freakish and alien,_ when people wanted to be rude. But _never_  beautiful. Only his mother and Cole had ever called his eyes anything but purely wrong. And even Cole had called them _strange_ at first. _Beautiful_ wasn't anyone's first response. 

  
But it was _hers._  

  
"Starburst pupils and different colors, two different birth defects." He surmised quickly, half-mumbled. "And um...  _late._ " 

  
"What?" 

  
"My ninth birthday was on the first. I'm a Baby New Year." Jerry seemed to be eating his ugly pajama shirt, so Sky shifted around again, tugging it out of the warm cat's eager mouth. He didn't realize Freddie was staring until he turned his head to see those cocoa eyes inspecting his own. His father looked like he wanted to say something, but the words were stuck in his mouth. Finally the poor man forced out a: 

  
"What would you like for your birthday then, Dovey? I'm sure I can get it for you or make someone else get it. I do have nine birthdays to make up for, after all. Whatever your heart desires!"  

  
He threw out his arms dramatically, as if trying to hide the guilt that shone plain in his eyes. Sky's own burned for a different reason entire. _Freddie Mercury couldn't bring his mother back, couldn't on good conscience send him back to New York City alone, and couldn't bring Cole or the Brennans to him. So what use was he?_   Sky felt such shame the very moment that thought bloomed in his head and he forced it down viciously. 

  
"Drawing pencils, a needle and thread, and some sketching paper." 

  
He listed off slowly, as if he was afraid his father would get confused. Afraid he was asking for too much. But Freddie just waved his hand dismissively when Sky paused, gesturing for him to continue. 

  
" _What?"_ His father asked when enough time had elapsed. "Is that _all,_ darling? No need to be shy!" Voice turning from flippant to surprised. Sky just shifted long enough to take Tom into his arms for a proper cuddle, the kitty squeaked indignantly at the change in position, but then relaxed into his hold once more. 

  
"You said I could have whatever I wanted, Papa. I want _those._ " Quiet and painfully small, curled up in the uncomfortable chair like he didn't quite belong. A square peg in a round hole sort of deal. It was Mary who rescued him. ( _He'd never **needed** rescuing before)_. 

  
"Those sound _lovely_ , Sky. And very _reasonable_ as well! Unfortunately, not the sort of things we sell at _Biba_ and I'll have to go into work soon." She tsked, as if genuinely put-out. "Oh! Freddie, don't you have a meeting with _the boys_ early today?" 

  
"Hm?" Freddie snapped to attention once more. "Oh,  _yes_ , actually. We're meeting with Beryl about the next leg of the tour and mayhaps a brief spell of tossing around the skeleton of our next album, _the usual_." Stirring up his syrupy plate, absentmindedly.

  
But he shook himself then, as if having to remind himself that Sky existed, that he wasn't just having morning tea with Mary, before buggering off to where he needed to be. " _Brilliant!_ Dovey, you can come with me! I'll make sure we get out in time for lunch and your gifts! Would you like that? We can even peruse the stalls and see if there's anything else you'd like!" 

  
Sky just nodded, quickly, if only to get it over with. 

  
 _Dovey._ He hung onto that word. He liked it, it made him want to smile. 

  
Freddie seemed to take his silence for excitement and hastily ushered him up to go get ready. Displacing every cat but Oscar, who just blinked blearily, before snuggling back down again, seemingly having made Sky his permanent home. Those clear needlelike claws latched onto any giving surface, making sure he didn't fall. 

  
He didn't realize how his father had _changed_ in his mind, until he was tugging out a pair of red corduroy overalls from where Mum Mary had tucked them into an open drawer, away from sight in a powder white vanity. The kind with curved spindly legs that looked like something to pose next to in a glossy issue of  _Vogue._

  
That wasn't even trying to process the impossibly fluffy bed with a shiny crystal chandelier above it or the heavy etched mirror on the wall, too high for him to see himself through. It was a pretty room, but it wasn't  _his._ Of course he'd never even had his own _bed,_ so what did he know? 

  
For just a moment, he touched the glittery bubble-stenciled letters on the back of his outfit:  _Starchild._

  
A gift from Mrs. Siobhan Brennan, a little inside joke between the two of them relating to his funny middle-name. A small  _Halley's Comet_  was below it, shooting across the striped corduroy sky. 

  
Underneath it, he wore an oversized gray  _Queen_  shirt that had belonged to his mother, it was half-faded and he'd had to stuff it into the overalls, but it still bunched over the sides. It was _soft_ and still smelled like _her_ , that made it special.

  
On his feet were a pair of lulu-lemon wellies, ones that he didn't even remember packing, so it must have been Mrs. or Mr. Brennan, maybe even Cole. But he was delighted to have them. Attempting to tame his hair with his fingers before repositioning his crown, it was still kind of tilted, but he liked it that way. Tossed on a pink tutu with little silver sparkles and he was ready to go. _(He liked that one because it slid on over anything)_. 

  
His father wasn't an _abstract concept_  anymore. That was something he mused about as he skipped down the steps, two at a time. He was more than  _Freddie Mercury,_ he was _Papa,_ he wasn't an unseen ghost whose footsteps that he was desperately trying not to step into.

  
But he still didn't know what to do without his mother. 

  
He missed a step and felt his heart jump up into his throat. Shut his eyes tight and blindly hoped that his foot would somehow find its place again. 

  
 _It did_. 

  
Sky's mother was the _chronology of his life._

  
She was the story of his scraped knees and tears. The scrapbook of precious memories, of short and long days, of nights sick with polio and medicine that never helped, painful surgeries that made him cry himself to sleep, rampant victories and vicious passions. Fostering a love for math and the stars in the sky above. In _running_ once he could, in helping others, in _dancing_ , in _piano_ , in becoming somebody _great_ one day, no matter what he decided to be. 

  
In showing that sweet _inlaid greatness_ every single day. 

  
She was the story of his life. Of every promise, every whispered  _I love you_. Of every  _Prince Rhye_ and terrible rendition of _Queen._ She held every memory within her body, the place he'd first begun. His first home, the first place he'd ever felt loved. 

  
She was _his past_. 

  
And now she was gone. His chest burned in the worst kind of way. He was the only one left to remember now, not even Cole had been there for _everything._  

  
For an instant he tried to imagine his wedding day, a white tuxedo, a black and white kilt, curls going every-which-way and contrasting beautifully against the white of the satin. Tiny white flowers braided into a crown on his head. He would feel a featherlight touch in his hair, straightening the mess. Nimble fingers ghosting against his skin, a warm rumbling voice near his ear, telling him that everything was going to be okay, that he was the most lovely creature ever to grace God's green earth. But if those hands and voice weren't his mother's... _Then whose were they?_

  
_He would miss her forever._

  
It ached somewhere deep inside of him, bleeding freely in a place he couldn’t reach. 

  
_"Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?_   
_Caught in a landslide_   
_No escape from reality_   
_Open your eyes_   
_Look up to the skies and see..._

_I'm just a poor boy, I need no sympathy_   
_Because I'm easy come, easy go..._   
_A little high, little low..._   
_Anyway the wind blows, doesn't really matter to me, to me..."_

  
His backpack bounced when he rounded the last step and skidded to a stop in front of the kitchen. Where Mum Mary looked to be rushing around, and somehow flawlessly Cupid's bowing her mouth with pink lipstick as she argued with his father. Well, _argued_ was too strong a term. It was more like they were discussing something very loudly, while they each did their own tasks. His father was combing through his hair while peering into a crystal mirror. 

  
"...here." 

  
"I know that! It's just... I'm _me_ , Stevie dear. I can't even  _drive!_  What happens when he needs to learn,  _hm?!_  Or when he needs help in school and the only thing I do is draw him _a bloody tree!_ Or if he's sick and needs soup and cheese biscuits! I can't make them, darling! I'm _hopeless in the kitchen_ , you know that!" 

  
Obviously his voice belied his dramatic devil-may-care attitude, because she stopped to stare at him then, sternly. Almost like a mother. 

  
" _Freddie_ , _anyone_ can teach him how to drive. If he even  _wants to learn!_ We can hire a tutor if we have to, sweetling. And I'm sure Brian would be happy to help if Sky has any school troubles, Roger and Deaky too for that matter. When he's ill, _I'll_ make the soup, dear, if it's really that important to you. Oh, and doesn't your Mum make the best cheese biscuits as well? I'm sure she'd do anything for _her only grandchild_ , including whip up a batch or two." 

  
Freddie's eyes grew even wider still, and darkened with true unspeakable horror. 

  
" _My God Mary._.." He whispered. "How am I going to tell  _my Mum?"_

  
She just deadpanned, rolling her blue eyes to the heavens above. 

  
"I'm sure  _It's A Boy!_ notices would go over swimmingly! Just let them know that they're about nine years late, love." 

  
The horror turned into a venomous scowl. 

  
" _I hate you, Steve._ " 

  
"The feeling is quite mutual,  _Mel."_ She quipped, sipping her tea and pressing a kiss to his father's fuzzy temple. Her flowery print dress swam around her knobby knees as she turned. Raising up in grooves like the choppy waves of the sea. That's when she caught sight of him, and his outfit. 

  
He wasn't _dumb_ , you know.

  
He _knew_ he didn't dress like the other boys. His Mama had never minded though and the kids at school and down the block got used to him after a while, mostly because they knew he would crush their noses into their skulls if they dared to say anything uncouth about his crowns, tiaras or any other garb that paired nicely with them.

  
It wasn't even that he preferred _girls' clothes_. On the contrary, he just gravitated to things with bright colors, pretty patterns and sparkly things that tended to catch the eye. Often times those just happened to be traditionally feminine. 

  
Not to mention how just about everyone he knew, eventually caught onto his mother's _Prince Rhye_ gimmick and would get him toy scepters, crowns and capes to play dress-up with as birthday and holiday presents. 

  
He'd never really felt ashamed about his clothing choices. Not until Mum Mary was staring at him, inspecting him from the toes of his wellies up to his fluffy black curls and crown. 

  
"Oh _my._.." She murmured at first, swallowing down her mouthful of tea with an audible gulp. But that shocked look of surprise turned into one of serene fondness. "You certainly inherited something _else along_ with that smile. You know, the first time I met your father at _Biba_ he was wearing this skimpy little number up top with these _horribly tight_ bellbottoms..." 

  
" _Mary!"_ He squawked, indignant. Until he caught sight of what Sky was actually wearing. Then his mouth shut tight and his dark eyes grew ever larger. 

  
"And I certainly would _never_ wear anything that clashed that badly! Dovey, you're worse than your _Auntie Mags,_ I have to dress that long-legged show poodle before every bloody concert, lest he try to sneak up there with mismatched socks, sandals and a t-shirt that doesn't even come close to matching his capris! Or those fucking clogs! ...Wouldn't you like to wear something _(anything)_  else?" His voice was edging on desperate, so of course Sky shook his head. 

  
Then, thinking better of it, he stuck out his fat bottom lip and bade his eyes to water. Whispering in a very obviously put-on broken voice: "You don't think I look _pretty,_ Papa? I wanted to look nice to meet everybody... I'll go _change..._ " He flopped his curly bangs over his eyes, hunched over and began to walk away, towards the stairs. He could hear, almost audibly, the sound of his father's heart breaking. 

  
" _Ooo! Dovey, I'm sorry!_ I was wrong, you look _lovely!_ Stay exactly as you are, _yeah?_ " His voice was rushed and harried. 

  
Sky whipped around with a sunshine smile on his face. 

  
" _Yay!_ _Thank you, Papa!"_  

  
He rushed over and threw his arms around the young man's middle, burying his face into the soft button-up on reflex. 

  
" _I love you!"_  

  
He crowed, not realizing then that it was _the first time._  

  
His father most certainly did however, and looked just about frozen for an instant, hesitating for a moment too long as he slowly reached up to cup the back of Sky's curly head and press him closer. He fumbled on the words: " _I love you too, Dovey_." But they came anyway, if a bit garbled. He felt them lodge somewhere in his chest, the planting of a little seed that would grow into something flourishing and grand one day. 

  
Sky had no qualms about saying the same to Mum Mary as they were getting ready to leave.

  
He loved fast and he loved hard, almost _forcefully_ so. She took the kiss on her cheek with a melted chocolate grin and returned one to his forehead with the same level of care. She buttoned him into one of his father's jackets, tight enough to look stylish and hip on the man, but big enough to hover around the tops of Sky's calves. He was _really small_ by nature _(or more likely, the polio had stunted his limbs)_ , and the larger clothes only made it more overt. 

  
His father's hand was tucked protectively around his own as they strode out of the house and to the waiting car on the street. It was shiny and this whitish-grey color, ( _that was all he knew about cars really_ ) and the seats were plush and comfy. It seemed like there was room inside for  _days_. 

  
" _Vicki!_ To the studio please, love!" His father called to the driver, _Vicki?_ who soon rolled down the partition with a sort of resigned familiarity. 

  
"Fred, I can't hear you with the partition up, we've been over this. Where is it you wanted to go?"

  
His tone was rather long-suffering behind the Scottish brogue and Sky hid a smile in the folds of his father's jacket. 

  
"Wessex, lovely. Make it snappy. _Oh!_ And this is  _Sky_ ," His father gestured over at him flippantly, but he still gave a little half-wave in response to the red prickly stubble and green eyes that turned to stare at him. _Green like Cole's eyes._ Another pang of homesickness buried itself in his chest."He'll be in here quite a bit as well, so best be friends! ...Isn't he just the most  _adorable_  little thing?" That last bit seemed to be just for Vicki, about _him_ of all things, and it made Sky pink up in the cheeks. 

  
" _Fred..._ he's a _kid,_ _not a handbag or a new accessory_... You know that,  _right?_ " 

  
The words were slow and drawn out, like the driver was making sure Freddie would understand, as though he was a child himself. 

  
His father colored high up in his cheeks as well, gritting his teeth audibly enough for Sky to hear. " _Of course I know that!_ I'm not some stuck-up airheaded _fool!_ All of you do this!  _Oh, look, Freddie is so campy that it must make him **vapid** as well. Head up in the clouds thinking of nothing but nail lacquer and Japanese pottery! _ Is that _it,_ Vicki? You think I'm going to treat _fatherhood_ like a passing _fancy?_ " 

  
Ooo, that sounded like a _sore spot._  

  
Not about the fatherhood bit, but about being a pompous airhead.

  
But instead of instantly backtracking and apologizing a dozen times like Sky would’ve _(Or you know, yelled back)_ , Vicki just rolled his eyes. Like he was used to getting his head bitten off! 

  
" _Fatherhood?_ So he's _yours_ then? Is it a _new thing_?" _Adoption_  is what the guy was implying, but trying not to say for some reason. 

  
Freddie slumped back in his seat, pointedly looking away from his progeny. "New to _me_." 

  
Vicki's eyes flickered to Sky again and he smiled, all toothily in a way he usually wouldn't. But then again, they were his most distinctive Freddie characteristic. That and the lips and cheekbones. 

  
" _Ah_." 

  
Vicki turned around and began to roll up the partition again, and Sky blurted out: " _An bhfuil Gaeilge agat?"_

  
A little fool spurting off Irish Gaelic to a Scotsman. 

  
Maybe it was seeing Cole's eyes in another's face, maybe he was more than a little desperate for someone else who spoke the language that made him think of home. But the partition stopped going up regardless. Vicki's eyes, so like Cole's, were alight with surprise and a new sort of smile as he answered in shoddily pronounced Irish Gaelic, but it was  _something_  at least. 

  
" _Tá cúpla focal agam_. My Mam was Irish, she taught me a little. Yours too, I suppose?" 

  
He shook his head. "No my Mama was American, Scandinavian if you want to get into lineage but my best-friend and his family are from Ireland. They taught me everything I know." 

  
Sky didn't notice his Papa looking over at him, varying shades of pride coloring in the contours of his smile.

  
It was only later on in the drive though, when the partition was back in place, that Freddie tucked a curl behind his ear and asked the million dollar question. "Why don't you tell me a little about this _best-friend_ of yours?" 

  
Every part of Sky shone like the sun in an instant. 

  
"Well... um, his name is _Coltrane Brennan_ like the famous sax player, even though he can't even play _the kazoo_ decently. We met when I was six and he was eight, I knocked out one of his front teeth and ripped out a couple chunks of his stupidly blonde hair. We've been best-friends ever since!" _The abridged version of events._

  
The look on his father's face could only be described as disbelieving horror, looking from the small brightly-colored boy in front of him, to the tiny fists that had supposedly seriously harmed another child. 

  
But Sky had already launched into another tangent about his Cole and literary device of all things.

  
"Most everybody calls him _Cole_ though and he wants to be a wildlife photographer or a professional dancer when he grows up, it changes a lot. One birthday his parents bought him a whole bunch of film rolls and we took pictures _for months_ , pretending we were stalking the African savanna or the wild undiscovered jungles of the Congo.

He loves horror books and will only read fairytales if I read them to him. I read him all of Grimm's and Anderson's and want to read him _The Scarlet Pimpernel_ soon. It's not _really_ a fairytale, but it reminds me of _Robin Hood_. Except a bit _backwards_ , I suppose. Since he saves aristocrats from being taken to the guillotine. I don't really agree with a lot of the choices they may have made, but nobody deserves to die for mistakes first perpetuated long before they were born and..." 

  
He only realized he was rambling and getting into nerd territory then, and quickly popped his hands over his mouth. " _Sorry._ I got excited." He mumbled. 

  
Freddie blinked a him a few times before gently reaching over to tug the hands away from his mouth.

  
"Never apologize for being _passionate, Dovey_. It's refreshing to see." 

  
Sky used his freed hands to fluff at his tutu anxiously instead. 

  
"A lot of people don't like it though. When you look too smart or you talk too much..." He murmured, eyes looking away in muted embarrassment as usual. But his Papa just shrugged. 

  
" _Well fuck 'em then, Dovey._ "

  
-X-

  
" _Mama, just killed a man_  
 _Put a gun against his head_  
 _Pulled my trigger, now he's dead..._

_Mama, life had just begun_   
_But now I've gone and thrown it all away!_   
_Mama, ooo..._   
_Didn't mean to make you cry_   
_If I'm not back again this time tomorrow_   
_Carry on, carry on, as if nothing really matters..."_

  
His father's hand enveloped his once more and he was happy for the sensation. Even if his Papa did have hairy knuckles like a troll. 

  
Unfortunately, despite paying a cursory amount of attention, he still had no idea how _(in the veritable seven circles of hell),_ to find his way back out again, _especially_ after they'd finally reached the meeting room.

  
Guess he was stuck with _Father Mercury_ for the long haul. 

  
The young man looked from the windowed conference room to the crushed velvet couch nearby, as if having a mental debate of whether or not to introduce his coworkers _(more like life-partners by this point)_ to Sky. But in the end, practicality won out and he dragged Sky into the meeting in one fell swoop. Already grimacing at the explanations he was going to have to make.

  
But as it turned out, there was already _another son_ causing a ruckus and it wasn't even _Sky._  

  
It was an exhausted John Deacon, Sky would've known him anywhere, toting around a wailing red-faced baby back and forth, back and forth.

  
Looking near to tears himself. 

  
Various bits of baby paraphernalia were strewn across the center table, none of it doing any good.

  
Pacifiers, a filled bottle that had clearly been unsuccessful in plying the little mite, stuffed animals, blankets, diapers, the whole lot. Brian May was looking upon the whole situation with concern burning in his eyes, but edging on annoyance as the sound grated on his ears. The child had obviously been crying for quite a while.

  
In contrast, Roger Taylor was rhythmically banging his towhead against the table, irritation and annoyance more prevalent than concern on his face, sunglasses hiding a nasty hangover no doubt. Another man that Sky didn't recognize was trying to hide his grimace in the corner, constantly shuffling the papers in front of him. 

  
Sky saw the problem right away. 

  
But it was like no one had even _noticed_ their arrival.

  
The nine-year-old tugged his hand out of his father's grip and marched towards Deacon with small arms outstretched. But the poor man seemed to be too lost in a haze of exhaustion and brokenness of spirit, to register the furtive little hands tugging at his shirt. Brian _did_ though and he squinted in confusion. 

  
"Um... _John?"_  

  
But before anyone could make a move, Sky made one himself, he used a nearby empty chair, likely left for his father, to climb up on top of the table and charge towards Deacon at a height where he'd have to be _blind_ not to see him. 

  
“Gimme!” He demanded, arms outstretched towards the baby. But aside from stopping in his pacing, the bassist made no move to relinquish his infant.

  
" _Gimme!"_  He voiced, even louder, shaking his arms to demonstrated where exactly he expected the child to be deposited. 

  
Still no movement. Oh _Good Lord._

  
"Give me your baby, _you useless lollipop!"_ He shrieked, finally heard above the din. _What? He didn't want to grievously insult the man right off the bat! He had the rest of his life to do that._

  
Not noticing how his father was already blushing so hard that he was practically purple, hiding away in the doorframe. The only good bit, was that he finally got a curly-haired baby plopped into his arms. The little thing just wailed something fierce, even laying in _his_ grasp.

  
But Sky bent a single finger and stuck it between the poor mite's swollen red gums. The barest hint of milk teeth were sensible as the baby bit down.

 

Thankfully, once the familiar burning warmth of _his Gift_  lit up his skin like wildfire, those shrill cries all but died in the tiny thing's throat.

  
Sulfur toasted the inside of his nose and ash deadened the tastebuds on his tongue, but it was well-worth it just to see the little baby let go and relax into him. 

  
Poor little boy was _exhausted_ from the whole ordeal. Sky gave him a featherlight kiss on the downy head to soothe him even further.

  
Only then did his Frankenstein monster eyes look up to meet his new Auntie Belisha's. The bassist was staring at him, open-mouthed and in struck-dumb awe. 

  
"His mouth hurts because he's _teething._ Try using cold toy rings or pacifiers that you put in the freezer. Cold will numb the area so it doesn't hurt as bad when the teeth break the surface of his gums." 

  
But he made no move to hand the baby back, cuddling his new sidekick close to his chest.

  
"What's his name?" 

  
"Robert." Auntie Bel’s voice cracked in the middle of the delivery, but Sky still understood and snuggled the baby close and cooed to him in a volume that _only they_ could hear. 

  
“Hello, Robbie! _Little bird_... You know my Mama was named  _Roberta_ , but she always went by _Birdy_. You're my new little bird now. Did you know a _Skylark_ 's a bird as well? Us _feather-brains_ have got to stick together."

  
"Excuse me, but _who are you?_ Have you lost your parents? Are you here on a school trip?" 

  
Brian asked, gently, reaching for Sky slowly, as if to guide him away and into the care of anybody else.

  
Sky realized then, that he was facing little more than Auntie Bel, Robbie and the wall covered in soft lined upholstery. They couldn't see him and thought he was a lost little duck and well, they weren't _wholly_ wrong...

  
A bright smile twitched to life on his rounded lips and he didn't bother covering up where nobody else could see, conveniently forgetting about John Deacon of course, whose jaw _dropped_ for a second time, as he noticed the similarities between Sky and his father. All starting with those ever-distinctive horse teeth.

  
" _Oh. My. God._ You're  _Freddie's_ aren't you?" 

  
Oh, well, the jig was already up. _Shocker._

  
He nodded and then slowly turned around, making sure not to stir enough to wake the now-sleeping infant on his narrow chest. Still smiling comically wide where everyone could see.

  
He hated being gawked at like a sideshow attraction, but figured he may as well put up with it, if it made explaining things that much easier.

  
_(Or maybe it was just because they knew Freddie so well, that they could easily see his father in his face, a fair bit sooner than most)._

  
_"_ Yes darlings, he's mine. Everyone, this is my son _Rhye_ , who prefers the name  _Sky. Sky_ this is..." He cut his father off then, remembering what they'd practiced in the car. 

  
"Auntie Maggie, Auntie Elizabeth, Auntie Belisha and Auntie Beryl." 

  
John Deacon’s he'd made up all by himself. Belisha for the dozen belisha beacons they'd passed on their way in.

  
All hell broke loose after that. 

  
"What the _bloody hell, Fred!_ You've hidden  _a son_  all this time?! How did you even...??" 

  
"Freddie,  _honestly_. Didn't you think about how this might _effect us as a band?_ We should've at least been  _told!"_  

  
"Have you been hiding him from the press? Is _that_ what this is about? _Bloody_... Freddie, we've got to talk about _health insurance mate,_ you've got a little one!" 

  
The three voices were pushing with intensity, overpowering each other, but not enough for anything to be clearly understood by anyone. Sky simply busied himself with looking after Robert.

  
Poor Freddie looked flushed, sick and as lost as could be. 

  
"Fucking...  _Kid!_ " He perked up as Auntie Liz _(Roger Taylor)_ spoke to him by shouting across the whole conference room. "How old are you anyway? _Five?"_  

  
"Nine." 

  
" _Nine bloody years!"_  It turned into a screech.

  
Which certainly couldn't have been helping his blatant hangover.

  
In the end though, it was Auntie Belisha _(John Deacon)_ , his voice soft and edged with broken glass, who shattered the haze. His icy statements cut through everything like a razor sharp blade of sadness and disappointment. " _You came to my wedding."_ Directed at Freddie of course. "You were _there_ at the _birth of my son_. But all this time... You've been _lying_ to us? Being a father wouldn't have _changed anything, Freddie!_ You would've still been _the same_ in our eyes! We could've shared this, you and I."

  
_Rockstars turned fathers._

  
_"I didn't know.”_

  
His Papa finally sighed, looking far too old all of a second. Before slumping into his hands and shouting it. “I didn’t _know!”_

  
His father was what? _Twenty-nine? Thirty_ at most?

  
His mother never had that long. 

  
In an instant, there was a _flash_ in his eyes. Like the kind right after a camera goes off and you'd just looked somewhere you shouldn't have.

  
Only instead of blinking away the image floating in his starburst eyes, he saw a hand-painted waistcoat covered in cats of varying shapes and sizes. It was adorning a visibly sick man. Yet even through a caked-on face of makeup, covering up strange purple-red splotches on his skin, _bruises?_ , a receding hairline and rotten thinness… he would've recognized _his father's face_ anywhere.

  
Sky opened his mouth to scream, but as soon as the image was there, it was _gone,_ and he was left watching his father try to explain _his existence_.

  
The lingering _mistake._

  
He wanted to throw up. 

  
"She never _told me._ " His father whispered. A piss-poor excuse even to his own ears.

  
"I only have him _now_ because she couldn't look after him anymore." 

  
Auntie Liz looked enraged by the whole thing. "Ah, so where did the little tart bugger off to then?" His voice turned callous. 

  
" _Heaven, I guess_. If it's even _real_."

  
Sky said, just loud enough for them to hear.  _He was going to be civil, he was going to be civil,_ but then the words truly registered in his ears.

  
The only thing stopping him from kicking the shit out of Queen's drummer was the tired baby in his keeping. Tears burned in his funny eyes in a whole new way and he locked them with Roger Taylor, at least the man had the grace to look sheepish. 

  
"Insult _me_ all you want, I don't care. I know _I look funny_ , that's nothing new." Freddie looked like he wanted to say something, but Sky didn't give him the chance.

  
"But don't you  _ever_  call my Mama  _anything_  like that again! She was a  _good mother!_ She did everything she could for me!"

  
The tears fell and when they came, they wouldn't stop, no matter how _hard he tried_ to be angry or indignant.

  
"She... She put _animal crackers_ in my lunchbox." His voice sounded so much younger and raw like sandpaper. "She liked to sing your songs. Even though she was terrible, we did that sort of stuff together... _She didn't care if I wore my tutus to the supermarket, even if people stared at us!_ ” 

  
His father was openly crying, looking at him with such anguish, like it was his own personal failing, as if every one of Sky's tears another sin on the tally.  _(Drama queen)._

  
His Aunties weren't that far off either, especially poor Roger, who looked like he'd just run over and kicked a whimpering puppy. Then like he was going to be violently sick over it, all wrapped into one. 

  
"We didn't have much money, but she bought a bunch of plastic stars from the grocery and put them on the ceiling, so that I could see them the way I couldn't outside because of all the smog. She didn't know anything about stars, so she looked at a whole bunch of library books to get it right..."

  
He laughed through the pain in his chest, still taking care not to disturb the baby with his useless blubbering and tears. The same reason _yelling_ was off the table.

  
"I guess the next tenants will wonder why they're up there… And why there are tick marks on the wall with little PRs and ages next to them. Oh, it um… stands for  _Prince Rhye_. Because that's what _I_ was to her. Her little _Fairy Prince_. ... _Look,_ I'm not saying she was _perfect_..." He remembered the bruises and the awful men she always went back to. The nights they had no choice but to go hungry. Broken ribs and broken promises scattered like shards of glass across the floor.

  
"But I still love her more than anything else in the world. Because to me, she always was."  _Perfect. My Mama._

  
Robbie made a sleepy little whine in the back of his throat and released Sky's finger to curl up into his neck instead.

  
Baby's breath dampened the skin there but he couldn't bring himself to really care. 

  
"You're _right_ , buddy." He sniffled, smiling but all jumbled up. "There's been far too much crying in here already." His eyes flicked over to his father, who was surreptitiously blotting his tears away with the sleeve of his button-down. 

  
"Papa, weren't you _supposed_ to be having a meeting?" 

  
_Stop looking at me like that._

  
Freddie did that weird blinky thing that meant he was either thinking deeply or contemplating grisly murder, before launching into a tirade about the next leg of their tour. Completely ignoring his son once again.

  
The other Queen members seemed to need that period of adjustment, of normalcy, as well. Roger kept giving Sky these _looks_ , like he just couldn't believe Freddie had created progeny. _Or_ that he had just made that progeny cry by insulting his dead mother. Yeah, that could definitely pack a punch. 

  
Brian seemed happy enough to segue away from all the heavy emotions as well, but he did stare at Sky out of the corner of his eye too. As if using all those mad scientist skills to prove how likely it was that Sky wasn't _really_ his father's. And probably staring at his hair too. It was quite the coincidence that they shared the same hectic black curls.

  
At least little Robbie liked them well enough. _(He had a tiny fist wrapped up in there)._

  
 _J_ ohn Deacon looked halfway-asleep, slumped in his chair, monitoring the both of them despite being so obviously dead tired.

  
It was as though he'd immediately accepted the existence of Sky, _that_ or he was so very sleep-deprived that it all made sense. 

  
The nine-year-old closed his eyes and imagined charcoals and pastels coloring the backs of his eyelids. Drawing a sunset, smeared with his fingers to make it look realistic. Little Robbie slept on, as Sky's fingers twitched with the need to draw him. Edging out those eyes with thick colored pencils that were annoyingly hard to grip and hearing that satisfying sound of scraping the sketch paper with his utensils. Rounding the bends and scribbling in the contours. Bringing it all to life. 

  
 _'It's his first baby, you know.'_  

  
Sky's eyes popped open at the unfamiliar voice and saw a young man standing beside Deacon. They looked similar enough to be brothers, around the same age as well. 

  
' _I was much the same with him. Felt so bloody out of my depth_.' The spirit gently swept a few strands of Deacon’s hair out of his face, a sad little smirk decorating his lips.

  
The bassist sneezed. Completely blind to the presence.

  
 _Oh._ So not brothers then.

  
He wondered how old Auntie Bel was when he lost his father. 

  
' _I'd imagine your father feels the same about you, Little Bit. It's going to be quite the adjustment, but having a son is one of life's most blessed gifts.'_

  
The fact that he wasn't at all phased by listening to a ghost wax poetically about fatherhood, could say a lot about how Sky’s life was going right about then. 

  
_'I'm Arthur Henry. You're Sky, then?'_

  
He nodded, almost imperceptibly. 

  
' _Thank you for healing my grandson._ ' The warmth in his voice was like being wrapped in a fluffy blanket or towel that had just come out of the dryer. All crisp and snuggly tight. Imbuing its warmth long after the initial touch had gone.  

  
But as soon as he was there, as soon as he had come, the ghost man was gone. Evaporated into nothing at all.

  
Faint streams of starlight blotted the air afterwards, before they too faded away. Oh. So not earthbound then. That was good.

 

The baby in his arms burbled and blew little bubbles of spit into Sky's exposed neck. _Gross_ , but he could _cope_ , he supposed. 

  
He mock-scowled as he pulled the smug little face away from his neck. 

  
"You're going to be a right _little troublemaker_ , aren't you?" He groused, quietly, as to not disturb anyone. 

  
There were strings of spittle leading from his neck to the little imp's mouth. _Nasty._ He pulled a face, exaggerated of course, to make the little Gremlin laugh. Robbie laughed with his whole body, clapping pudgy hands and a gaping mouthed grin that curled up at the edges. Delightful drooling little monster. 

  
"I've always wanted a _little brother."_ He mused. "I suppose you'll have to _do._ " He tickled the tiny tot viciously and the laughs increased in volume and intensity. 

  
Perhaps in that instant, he was preoccupied enough to forget where he was, because he started to sing. Not genuinely, of course. But being a music baby, he thought Robbie might enjoy a lullaby.

  
 _"I see a little silhouetto of a man.._." He trilled, softly. 

  
" _Scaramouche, scaramouche will you do the fandango!?_ " He put on a funny voice and stuck out his already protruding teeth to make the tiny boy laugh, yet again. The sound was almost better than music.  _Almost._

  
" _Thunderbolt and lightning very very frightening me!_ " Pulling a mock-shocked face, like he was about to launch into a thrilling game of peekaboo. His voice deepened slightly for the effect, not that it was all that deep in the first place.  

  
" _Gallileo, Gallileo,_  
 _Gallileo, Gallileo,_  
 _Gallileo Figaro - magnifico!"_

  
And boom, all his common sense was out the window. He was sitting cross-legged on a conference room table, singing a terrible, overly theatrical rendition of his favorite part of  _Bohemian Rhapsody.._. in front of  _Queen_. In his full-on too girly voice. Trying to create a false echo, as he sung the _Gallileos_ to himself and little Robbie. Well, _little bird_ seemed to be enjoying it at least. 

  
He looked up, anxiously, a flush high in his cheeks and biting down on his bottom lip lightly. He was being stared at, again. 

  
"Dovey, why don't you two _wait outside?_ We'll be done soon and then we'll run the rest of our errands." A dismissive little wave of his father's hand and an _annoyed?_ tight-lipped smile. 

  
Sky obediently did as he was told, smothered the urge to backtalk, and grabbed Robbie's baby bag, after collecting all the strewn about paraphernalia and toting it along. But still, he paused in the doorframe. 

  
"Papa, can the Aunties come with us? Auntie Bel, Auntie Liz, Auntie Berry and Auntie Mags?" As if he needed the clarification. 

  
But Freddie's mind had already flitted onto the next topic, so he just nodded, absentmindedly. 

  
"Yes, whatever you'd like, Dovey." 

  
His smile grew two sizes as he headed out of that room. Flouncing about with Robbie snuggled into his neck, he heard voices follow him however. Perhaps he should have properly shut the door…

  
"Oh, so you speak for us now, Fred?" Auntie Maggie quipped, but it was a lighthearted thing, not brusque or angry. 

  
"Well do you want to say _no_ to that face?! _Feel free, darling!"_

  
Brian had no more to say. Roger piped up instead, sounding bitter as all hell. 

  
"Any doubt that I had about him being _Freddie's_ is long gone. No other kid could bust out _perfect falsetto_ without even _trying_. Not to mention those teeth and dagger-cheekbones." He grumbled. Sky wasn't doing falsetto though, that was just his _natural voice_. He felt kind of insulted. 

  
" _Dagger-cheekbones?_ Rog, what are you on about?" 

  
"You can't tell me you haven't noticed! They could cut bloody glass, Freddie!" 

  
Freddie sputtered like a boiling tea-kettle. But John finally spoke to cut off his incredulity. 

  
"You said that you didn't know he _existed,_ and that his Mum couldn't take care of him anymore. What, did they just dump him on you like _Baby Moses_ in a basket?" 

  
"Pretty much." Freddie sighed and scrubbed at his temples, at the gray that was threatening to grow in far too early.

  
" _Lads._.. Am I even doing _the right thing? I can't be a father!_ I can't even _tie my own bloody shoes! Or cook, or drive!_ I'm fucking _hopeless.._." 

  
"You're not doing this alone. You know that, Fred. You've got _us!"_  

  
" _Rog, you're as bloody hopeless as I am!"_

  
 _"Then raise the kid yourself, you tosser! See if I care!"_ But his tone was light and jesting. They were in it for the long-haul. 

  
Whatever that meant. 

 

-X-

  
" _But I'm just a poor boy and nobody loves me..._  
 _He's just a poor boy from a poor family,_  
 _Spare him his life from this monstrosity!_  
 _Easy come easy go... will you let me go?_

_Bismillah! No we will not let you go! Let him go!_   
_Bismillah! We will not let you go! Let him go!_   
_Bismillah! We will not let you go! Let me go!_   
_Will not let you go! Let me go (never)..._   
_Never let you go! Let me go!_   
_Never let me go! ooo..._   
_No, no, no, no, no, no, no!_

_Oh mama mia, mama mia, mama mia! Let me go!_   
_Beelzebub has a devil put aside for me..._   
_For me,_   
_For me..."_

  
He was scribbling away in his sketchbook, Robbie sleeping soundly next to him on the couch. Sky would look over every few seconds to make sure he was okay. 

  
His pages became littered with sketches of the tiny boy next to him.

  
Dark blonde, edging on brown hair just starting to curl atop his tiny head. But his eyelashes were a pale blonde, a good contrast to his hair-color and eyebrows.

  
When Sky was done real-life sketching, he was drawing a pair of princes, _brothers_. One with a mess of dark curls and strange glowing eyes, the other smaller with light brown curls and hands outstretched to the sky. Matching crowns and standing in a field with a far back tree-line, surrounded by two sleeping lions, excited pixies flying above their heads and an enormous crab shading them. Protected at all sides. 

  
_So loved._

  
_A love eternal._

  
In a few sketches, his beloved yellow knight was kneeling in order to press a kiss to the tiny prince's chubby hand.

  
 _The King of Rhye_ became more detailed as well, holding hands with the dark curly-haired prince. Their wings matched, with same whorls and shine down to a T. Drawn to fit together in the exact same way. He also wasn't dressed like pure winter anymore either. He was red and covered with _feather_ s, or maybe _fallen leaves_. 

  
And the _King's Men_ started appearing as well. A long blonde-haired Noble with fluffy sleeves and a ring around his neck like Shakespeare, an elf instead of a fairy, or maybe something in-between.

  
A jester in sparkly clothes that shone like diamonds, complete with tights and curling shoes, a veritable pixie. And another knight, this one with a guitar made out of the bones of his enemies and a threatening stare to frighten those who were an insult to the crown. 

  
He drew Cole a lot too. Determined to not forget the way he smiled, the way he parted his fluff, the chubby cheeks, the sandy hair and the way he wrinkled his nose when he laughed too hard. 

  
By the time the meeting was over, Sky had filled several pages with everything he could think of. His hand was stained with graphite on one side and dark smudges decorated his fingers. The Frankenstein sketchbook was always on his person. But when he heard the door open, he snapped it shut and shoved into his bag in one fell practiced movement. Then he took hold of his sleepy baby brother again. The tiny thing blew a couple of spit bubbles and then burbled happily, content to be awake without the pain in his mouth.

  
"'Ello, _Mini-Freddie!_ " Roger yawned as he slumped down next to them. 

  
Sky bristled. He wasn't a miniature or a second-rate of _anything_. He’d been pushing down the urge to be a little smart-ass, but then he remembered. _Boarding school. Orphanages. His murky future. What did it matter if he mouthed off? He ended up trashed either way._

  
"My name is _Sky_. Say it with me: _S-K-Y_.  _There!_ Simple enough. _Oh, I'm sorry_ … Have all the years of playing a broken garbage-disposal damaged your hearing?" 

  
Auntie Liz just gaped at him. So did Auntie Bel, Auntie Mags, Auntie Beryl and his father.

 

But his father recovered first. " _Sky! Apologize!_ " 

  
The boy only stared back blankly, like he didn't understand the Queen’s English or just didn't give a fuck. It probably came off as a bit of both.

 

When in truth he was waiting to see how far he could push, before catching a belt or a switch.

  
_(Mr. Brennan hadn’t been like that. But Freddie had been with his Mama, and given her past boyfriend track-record, how great could he really be…?)_

  
But then his Aunties started laughing, Liz included. " _Oh Lord,"_ he gasped through his tears, "You are most certainly  _not a Mini-Freddie._ The first time we met him, the poor sod was so incredibly shy that he wouldn't even _talk back!_ Of course, _now_ we can't get him to shut up. Should've enjoyed it while it lasted…” A mock-wistful tone coloring his words.

  
Papa scowled. 

  
"But yeah, I suppose I've got to remember you have _a mouth_ on you, little _spitfire_. And you'll gladly use it." Roger scrubbed away the joyful tears with his sleeve. "Maybe on _my side_ next time?"

  
Sky only grimaced and was narrowly saved from his Papa's wrath by the sound of another door opening and the appearance of a young woman. She was small, with a purple-violet turtleneck above her bellbottoms, a lovely round face and long golden brown hair. And she made a beeline for the baby in Sky's arms. Oh. _His mother._ Sky relinquished his charge without a fight, as John pressed a kiss to her cheek and she smiled at him like they were the only two people in the room. 

  
" _Ronnie, love!_ " Rog ruined it of course. But her smile just got bigger. 

  
Then she genuinely focused on the other people in the room. Freddie who gave a little wave and Brian who grunted with a nod, John Reid who gave a polite little _'hello_ , ' _Ronica'_. And the stranger on the couch. Her lips formed a perfect little 'o' as she studied him, his Papa's coat long since discarded. 

  
"Starting them a bit _early_ , aren't we? Are you lot recruiting Robert next?" She laughed. " _Queen 2.0: The Next Generation?_ " 

  
Sky smiled and crawled off the couch and stomped over to her, not stopping until their shoulders were lined up, then he took a small step backwards and did a grand sweeping bow, pressing a kiss to her free hand. Like an actor in some old Shakespearean drama.  

  
"Hello, I'm _Rhye Halley Bulsara_ , but you can just call me  _Sky._ It's a pleasure to meet you!" 

  
He bobbed back up and the smile on her face was completely delighted. " _Hello Sky,_ I'm _Veronica._ But you can call me _Ronnie_ , most of this lot does anyway." A wink. 

  
"And if I may say, your eyes are _so pretty_ , I don't think I've ever seen anything like them!" She peered at them more closely. Then her jaw dropped. "Wait...  _Bulsara?_ " Her own eyes slowly raised up to stare at Freddie. "Y-Yours?" 

  
The rockstar nodded, looking anywhere but her or his progeny. Her eyes fell to the little boy in question again and straightened the crown on his head with a mother's touch. 

  
"Well this fits quite well then.  _Queen's firstborn Prince."_

  
Her laugh reminded him of his mother’s.

  
" _Oh mama mia, mama mia, mama mia let me go!_  
 _Beelzebub has a devil put aside for me..._  
 _So you think you can stone me and spit in my eye?_  
 _So you think you can love me and leave me to die?_  
 _Oh baby, can't do this to me baby!_  
 _Just gotta get out just gotta get right outta here..._  
 _Ooh yeah, ooh yeah!_

  
_Nothing really matters..._   
_Anyone can see._   
_Nothing really matters nothing really matters... to me_

  
_Any way the wind blows…"_

 

 


	4. The Prophet's Song (January 1976)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> More Aunties, Family Bonding, proof that Sky is the Frian Lovechild, 70's Race Issues and a poor kid who just wants to keep his single remaining parent alive. (Which is far harder than you'd think). :)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Featured is Queen's "The Prophet's Song" and an old Irish blessing.

" _Oh oh people of the earth!_  
_Listen to the warning._  
_The Seer he said.._  
_Beware the storm that gathers here_  
_Listen to the wise man..._ "

 

 

 

Sky didn't pack his own backpack when he left the Brennans' apartment that day.

  
He threw a couple of last minute things in of course, _(mostly Cole's clothes instead of his)_ , but it was primarily the young Irish couple who did it all.

  
While he and Cole were asleep in Cole's bedroom, cried-out and dead to the world in each others’ arms, Siobhan and Pheelan Brennan were gathering up the younger boy’s things like precious artifacts and tucking them away for safekeeping.

  
They didn't pack it all, mostly because they were still hoping that it would all be for naught. That _their second son_ , their child through love and love alone, could stay with them for as long as he wished. That even though the world would never be right without _their Birdy_ in it, that they would still have Sky and that Sky would still have them. Anchoring each other to a cruel world that had taken the brightest star out of the sky. 

  
Pheelan moved to tuck Sky's beloved sketchbook inside the worn-out canvas sack, all the years he'd watched that tiny boy scribbling away in its depths. Sometimes allowing him to be privy to the wonderful worlds he created. 

  
His hands tightened imperceptibly on the precious book, teeth gritted tight against it all.

  
" _May the road rise to meet you. May the wind be always at your back. May the sun shine warm upon your face. And rains fall soft upon your fields. And until we meet again, May God hold you in the hollow of His hand._.." 

  
Phee’s voice cracked and waned, as he rubbed away the splotchy tears that fell on the hardcover. 

  
" _Sio_ ," His voice was raw as his wife lifted her head, eyes full of unshed tears. "They won't really take him from us... _will they?_ " 

  
There were pictures cradled in her hands, pictures from that little film-guzzling camera of Cole’s, snaps of he and Sky at the library, at the park, at school, eating ice-cream, playing soccer, Sky's tongue poking out the corner of his mouth as he played piano, the boys at dancing competitions and holding trophies and medals, maybe even mid-routine, birthdays, holidays, all of it… _a chronology_ of the boys' shared life. Her hands were shaking, and she couldn’t even bring herself to answer. 

  
"But he's _ours_." 

  
Phee insisted, preaching to the choir. She just shook her head, collapsing down on the bed, eyes laying as broken as her heart. 

  
" _We love him!_ " 

  
As if that was _enough._

  
As if their love for Birdy had been _enough_ to save her. _Their best girl,_ with curls like sunshine for days and a laugh like snowflakes melting on an open palm. The world was so much darker without _their angel_ to let the light in.

  
Siobhan broke down then, at the sound of her husband’s words. 

  
Love just _wasn't enough_. 

  
That baby boy, their baby boy, was torn out of their arms only hours later. The child they had spent so many years raising alongside their own flesh-and-blood. It was all Pheelan could do to keep hold of Cole and Siobhan, both who looked as though they were about to chase down the Social Service workers who'd taken their boy.

  
His eyes were downcast, and he would never forget the way Sky had screamed for them, tiny arms outstretched in desperation. 

  
The way they'd _failed him_. 

  
-X-

  
_"I dreamed I saw on a moonlit stair_  
_Spreading his hands on the multitude there_  
_A man who cried for a love gone stale_  
_And ice cold hearts of charity bare_

 _I watched as fear took the old men's gaze_  
_Hopes of the young in troubled graves_  
_I see no day, I heard him say_  
_So grey is the face of every mortal.._."

 

Sky climbed into his Papa's car once again, quickly followed by the man in question, and his growing collection of Aunties.

  
Ronnie had just come into the studio to take a  _(now not-fussy)_ little Robbie home, leaving Auntie Belisha some time to relax, something he looked like he sorely needed, given how he kept nodding off when given even _a second_ 's peace. The car was actually a _Silver Cloud Rolls Royce_ , something Auntie Liz had informed him all about once he actually questioned it.

  
Roger Taylor certainly knew a lot about cars. In fact, he only shut his trap once he heard Sky hum the first opening bars of the B-side to Bohemian Rhapsody. Not ready to open that can of worms it seemed.

  
Vicki hand-rolled the partition down with a little crank, apparently a feature that Freddie had insisted upon, and smiled widely when he saw Sky climbing into the car once again. 

  
" _Dia dhuit!_ " He called, with a touch of familiarity, if a shoddy accent. It made Sky's smile grow even wider. 

  
" _Dia is Muire dhuit!_ " 

  
Sky bobbed a mock little curtsy, there was really that much space in the tin can.

  
He genuinely hadn't realized though, that the other occupants were staring at him funny, until he sat back down and Roger exclaimed. 

  
"Wait, so Fred's  _Yankee Boy_  can speak _Gaelic_ too?  _Really?_ " 

  
Maybe it was supposed to be a compliment or just an expression of surprise. But Sky bristled anyway and opened his hot little mouth to retort. 

  
"Don't you _dare_ , young man! Or I’ll… _punish you_ , don't think I won't. _Be nice, darling! Please!”_  

  
Freddie seemed to be already familiar with Sky’s short array of angry and indignant expressions. It was an empty threat of course, belayed by the fact that he swatted at Auntie Liz on Sky’s behalf and he'd used the word ' _punish_ ' instead of a specific punishment. But, eh, two birds-one stone. 

  
"Which part do you use? The strap or the buckle?" It came out with a knowing sigh, as Sky pointedly looked out the window. 

  
"... _What?"_  

  
The aimless chatter of the car had faded away. And Freddie sounded legitimately confused. So Sky elaborated. 

  
"Of the belt? Are you going to _beat me_ with _the strap_ or _the buckle_ , when I talk back? I don't care about the strap, it leaves welts and burns after, but it's not too bad. …The buckle  _cuts_..." He really hated catching the buckle.

  
But with the way his father looked at him, all _bewildered_ , it he felt like he was trying to explain the concept to a child. A lost _pathetic_ little child. 

  
" _What?!"_ The echo came back like a roar and Sky shrank down in his seat. 

  
"Do you prefer _the switch?_ ...Do I have to _make my own?_ " He was really grasping at straws here, and it seemed like it was just pissing off his Papa even more. "Or do you use creative punishments, like kneeling on grits?" That one _hurt. What?_ He just wanted to  _know._ But the Persian man looked as though he'd just been slapped across the face by Sky's own hand. 

  
"I'm not going to  _beat you!"_  He sputtered, dark eyes stretched far too big. 

  
"I would never raise my hand against a child,  _never!_ "

  
Freddie's voice crackled and everything. Oh. Well, how was Sky supposed to know that? "I meant  _yell!_ Or _take away something_ , I don't know?!" His Papa’s large hands were fisted tightly in his hair, to hide the way they trembled. 

  
He reached out one of his own and set it on his father's knee. Healing magic sparking like currents in his fingertips, but he couldn't fix this with a little miracle. 

  
"It's _okay,_ Papa..." 

  
"No! No! It is  _not okay!_ " His voice broke midway through his retort. "It sounds like you speak from _experience_ and that  _isn't bloody okay!_ " 

  
Tears of shame burned in Sky's eyes, but as a grieving child and the sheer trash-mouth he was, he deflected the emotions into something he could better express. Indignation. 

  
"Why do you _care?!"_ He shrieked, his high-pitched voice working in his favor for once. "You don't even _know me!"_

  
" _You're my son!_ " 

  
Freddie stressed every syllable, like they somehow made a difference. Sky grit his teeth and his cheeks flushed pure fire-engine red. 

  
"No! I'm your  _mistake!"_

  
His father's earlier words still echoing in his ears like a broken record.

  
The older man blanched and shook his head, looking away. " _Sky, Dovey,_ I didn't mean it like that..." His voice had turned honeyed and soft. As if soothing a wild beast or a frightened creature backed up into a corner. Unfortunately, Sky was more liable to _bite_ than _whimper_. 

  
" _How else_ could you have meant it? I'm not  _stupid!_ " He refused to let the tears fall. "I can use _Euler's Method_ to solve differential equations! I know  _Trachtenberg_ and can do any computation you give me...  _inside of my fucking head!_ I know all the moons of Saturn! And I can recite _Avogadro's Constant_  till the 23rd power! I was named after a fucking _comet! I. Am. Not. Stupid."_ His breath hitched in his chest. 

  
"So  _yes_ , I know what a _mistake_ is..." His voice sounded wretched and raw as he flopped back down in his seat, not sure of when he first stood up, and buried his face in his borrowed jacket sleeves, so his father wouldn't see him cry, _again._  

  
Not sure why his math and space hobbies were a validation of his intelligence, but they were the smartest sounding things that came to mind and he had to say  _something._

  
The car grew uncomfortably quiet for a pretty minute after that. 

  
Although to his credit, Auntie Beryl did manage to spark up a light conversation about the set line-up and financials, but it was strained at best, even with that charming Scottish lilt at his disposal. Poor Auntie Bel had finally passed out, flopped haphazardly against the window, his sleep-deprivation from new fatherhood had made avoidance a losing battle. While Freddie was directly across from Sky, arms crossed and round pouty mouth pulled into a tight scowl, as he glared out the window, pointedly not looking at _anyone._  

  
"Favorite constellation?" 

  
Brian had shifted in his seat to face Sky, who simply raised his head to roll his eyes, rather petulantly. 

  
" _Two. Ursa Major_ and _Minor_." He shoved a few annoying curls out of his eyes. "And I know what you're trying to do..." It petered off like a sigh, as his head flopped back into his arms. 

  
Auntie Mags just raised an eyebrow. "Really? What am I trying to do?" 

  
Sky’s head snapped back up again. "You think if you  _commiserate_ with me, if you _pretend_ to like the stuff I like, then maybe you'll make me  _agreeable_. Well, the joke's on you!" His eyes burned with his mockery of a wide smile. “Because _I’m never agreeable_." 

  
Down went the head again. 

  
"Actually, my doctoral thesis, in  _astrophysics_ , is about _velocities in the Zodical Dust Cloud_ , studied from a series of scans by _Fabry-Perot Spectrometer_ in Tenerife." 

  
Sky froze. 

  
He didn't even process the smug tone of voice, he was too far in shock. 

  
" _Zodical Dust Cloud?_ " 

  
Brian went to elaborate, "Yes, Zodical light appears..." 

  
"Oh, I know what it is! It's _false dawn!_ You studied false dawn?! You got to use a _Fabry-Perot Spectrometer?!"_  

  
It was like dying and going to what Cole liked to call:  _Nerd Nirvana._

  
Auntie Maggie looked tickled pink that Sky genuinely knew, and was _interested_ , in what he was talking about and they instantly launched into a rapid-fire conversation about Tenerife and the studies currently going on there.

  
Sky segued them into geophysics and _the Aurora Borealis_ , his pet project. Minutes passed like seconds and he was practically vibrating with excitement the whole time. It was like the rest of the world had dropped away and all he could think about were the lights coloring the night sky. 

  
"Of course, I never actually finished. It's all written I just couldn't cope with all the edits and rewrites with touring and everything involving _Queen..._ " 

  
Sky's smile just grew wider and he leaned his puffball head against his bony Auntie Mags' shoulder. 

  
"Well, that's _perfect!"_ He beamed. "We can do it _together!_ I'll get mine from studying the Aurora Borealis and you'll get yours from studying the Zodical Dust Cloud. But we'll do it at the _same time_ , so you have to wait for me!" Another goofy-toothed smile. 

  
"... _Deal?"_  

  
He extended a tiny hand, one completely dwarfed by Brian's own. 

  
But the little boy's handshake, when it came, was surprisingly firm and determined. 

  
" _Deal._ Are you sure you want to be an astrophysicist though?" 

  
He nodded, still smiling. "Uh huh. When I'm not working with  _The March of Dimes_  to help eradicate polio, singing songs, dancing or making galleries full of art." He ticked a few dreams off on his fingers. Nowhere near all of them, but a few. 

  
Brian just blinked. 

  
"Big dreams." 

  
"Big _realities_." Sky corrected, swinging his feet in his seat. Frankly, _Mr. Astrophysicist/World-Renowned Guitarist_ had no room to judge the size or scope of dreams. 

  
"Yeah, yeah.  _Freddie's Boy_  wants to save the world and likes pretty stars. He's basically  _Brian Jr. We got it_." Roger yawned, the hallmarks of his hangover still oozing out in tendrils from his very being. Sky pouted, _his Gifts_ weighing heavily on him. Just like they usually did. 

  
"I _can't save the world_ , nobody can. ...But _I guess,_ I can always _try?"_  

  
He didn't see the way his father smiled, chest puffed out and full of pride in a way that was natural for a father. Despite having only been a _conscious_ father for about a day. Pride in your creations was something inborn. 

  
-X-

  
_"Oh oh people of the earth..._  
_Listen to the warning_  
_The prophet he said:_  
_For soon the cold of night will fall_  
_Summoned by your own hand..._

 _Oh oh children of the land..._  
_Quicken to the new life_  
_Take my hand_  
_Oh, fly and find the new green bough_  
_Return like the white dove..."_

 

" _Dovey?_ We're here."

  
Oh. He'd nodded off. 

  
Sky yawned and scrubbed at his closed eyes, blinking them open and climbing out, only to have a pair of hands wrap around his middle to set him on his feet. As though he couldn't get out by himself. Despite being so obviously _overprotective_ , his father was still pouting, eyes downcast and not quite looking at him.  _Fix it, Sky. Or he'll ship you off even sooner._

  
"Mercury has no moons." He blurted. 

  
His father quirked an eyebrow. "Come _again?_ "

  
" _Mercury, the planet_ , it doesn't have any moons. It _can't_. It's too close to the sun." He tapped the toes of his wellies together a few times. "It's too close to _the son_." He stressed, feeling silly as his cheeks flushed. And before he could think better of it, he surged forwards to wrap his arms around his Papa's lithe middle. Pressing his face into that tummy. 

  
"I'm _sorry_..." He cried, muffled, into his father. 

  
A gentle hand came up to cup the back of his head, amid all the curls and crown. 

  
"I know _my fat_ is comfortable, darling. But I can't hear you." Freddie practically purred and Sky raised his splotchy face, incredulous. 

  
" _Fat?_ Are you  _serious?_ Nope, you're  _delusional_. You've ruined the bloody moment." He turned on his heels to flounce off in a mock-huff, until a familiar pair of arms, covered in soft black fur, swept him up and tickled him. Making him shriek like mad and flail his short limbs helplessly. How in the seven hells was his father so strong? The man was basically a hairy toothpick with eyes. 

  
Yet there he was, face to the sky and laying in a practical back-bend over his father's pointy shoulder. 

  
His arms flopped around like noodles and he just couldn't stop laughing, a sentiment that seemed to be echoed by his Persian puffball of a father if the backtrack to his shrill giggles was any indication. 

  
"Auntie Liz!" He screeched, teeth on full view as he reached out to the one person he could make-out through the tears of laughter in his eyes. "Save me! _Rip his tits off!"_ His arms bounced like taffy. 

  
But how he found himself tugged out of his father's grasp and slung across the blonde's chest was another matter entirely. His head spun and he wondered why he was being passed about like _a hot potato_. 

  
"I'll be taking  _this,_ Fred! Now, let me at those _invisi-nips!"_  

  
One more spin, before he was finally set on his feet once more, steadied by Roger's surprisingly gentle hands, lest he fall over. He blinked dizzily, a smile still glowing from ear-to-ear. 

 

" _Invisi-nips?_   Rog, what are you on about?!"

 

"Fred, I've seen you shirtless more often than I'd care to admit and never once... have I _ever_   _seen_ your nipples." It's like they don't exist. _(They probably disappeared into the black-licorice forest on his chest)._

  
" _Fuck off!"_

 

Sky's laughter and genuine smile, only waned once he was sitting in a fancy unfamiliar restaurant with plush red seats, staring at a place-setting with four different forks of varying shapes and sizes, as well as dishes placed in an arrangement he couldn't even come _close_ to understanding. Suffice to say, he felt a little bit out of his depth. 

  
" _Whoa_... Why are there so many _different forks?"_  

  
His father just absently waved the question away with a laugh. "For  _different foods,_ Dovey." Then continued talking to Auntie Beryl. Sky's cheeks flushed with muted embarrassment and he moved to flip through the menu instead. Encountering a completely new problem. 

  
He tapped on Auntie Liz's shoulder. 

  
"Aunt Lizbeth?" Roger quirked an eyebrow, urging him to continue. Or at least, Sky thought he did, it was hard to see around the sunglasses. "What's ' _mash_ '?" 

  
A smile exploded across Rog's cheeks and he snorted a laugh. Oh. A _stupid question_ then. Sky's flush deepened. 

  
"You know, it's  _mash_. Um... made of those _brown things_ , the ones that grow in the ground? Damn. I can't think of the name! _Bri?_ " Roger kept gesturing and grasping at the air like he could capture the lost word with his hands alone.

  
Unfortunately Brian was too deeply wrapped up in a heated conversation with Sky's father and Auntie Beryl to notice their distress. 

  
"It's like mashed up  _chips,_ that stuff." 

  
Sky's mouth fell open. " _Chips?!_  But wouldn't that _hurt?_ They're all pointy and stuff!" 

  
It was Auntie Liz's turn to gape. 

  
" _Pointy?_ What are you _on about_ , Sky?  _Chips! Not crisps!_ " 

  
He was completely lost. 

  
"What are  _crisps?!_ Do you  _burn them?!"_  

  
Okay, so clearly their distress was now vocal enough to inspire an audience. Auntie Bel looked like he was losing his shit where he sat, laughing so hard he had to take a sip of water and then choked on that as well. There were tears in his eyes. 

  
"Are you two arguing about  _crisps and chips?"_

  
Freddie sounded wholly confused. Sky could very much relate. 

  
" _Potatoes!_ " Auntie Bel wheezed. "Rog, the word is  _potatoes!_ "

  
"Yes, _that!"_  Roger exclaimed, at the same time Sky groaned, head in his hands. "You couldn't just say  _mashed potatoes_ like a normal person?!" 

  
Then he had to painstakingly explain that _American chips_ were _crisps_ and that _British chips_ were _American French fries_. It was all so confusing. _(And made him feel more lost than normal. At least back home he knew what a fork was. He could buy a hotdog off a street corner and be understood by all around him. London made him feel like a lonely astronaut on the moon)_. He didn't even understand what he _ordered_ off the menu, something with a name he couldn't even _pronounce._ Of course he ate it anyway, being raised as he was, he knew never to waste good food. Especially when you didn't know _if and when_ you'd get it again. 

  
The oysters were good though. Whatever the hell they were, _raw fish_ or something. 

  
He had to watch his Papa eat them first, before he could emulate the process. Of course, his _maiden voyage_ meant some splattered across his nose, which made them both laugh like mad. The edge of the shell would catch on their protruding front teeth and tip it over far too early. He wished he'd known that _earlier. Thanks, Papa._ But there was no venom there. 

  
That's when he first heard the whispers. 

  
' _Is that Queen?'_

  
_'Bohemian Rhapsody, right?'_

  
_'From Top of The Pops?'_

  
The other patrons around them were tittering and trying to peer around the glossy banisters and curtain separating their table. His Papa instantly stiffened, grimacing for a moment, before his top lip shot down to cover his teeth and he smiled with a little fake twist. Just in time for a hand, complete with nails covered in red lacquer, to appear. And for muted rage to burn like coal in Sky's belly. 

  
He _hated his teeth_. He went out of his way to _hide his teeth_. But his Papa  _shouldn't have to_. He was so much happier when he could just be _free._ Was Sky a hypocrite?  _Yes_. Most definitely. Did it change the fact that he instantly hated those fans and mentally cast them into the fiery pits of hell?  _Nope_. 

  
It was a handful of teen girls verging on the precipice of young womanhood. Holding bits of paper and even a napkin, all looking very shy and unsure of themselves. 

  
" _Hello!"_ The one upfront finally piped up after staring at them for far too long, wordlessly. "Could we maybe get an autograph...  _Mr. Mercury?_ " She squeaked, pushing her bleach-blonde hair out of her eyes. His Papa just happened to be the closest. 

  
He moved to placate and grab the offered strip of rubbish paper. But Sky was faster. 

  
" _Sure!"_ He squealed in a voice that could only be described as bubblegum-pink acid. Eyes shining with a scary light and teeth on full view like a jack-o-lantern. 

  
" _Oh._ " He paused dramatically, as if he'd just realized their confusion. "You did mean  _Sky Mercury,_ right? Or did you mean  _my Papa?"_ He gestured to Freddie. 

  
The girl's cheeks colored so dark red, they were almost purple. Her eyes turned downcast. " _P-Papa? You're a father?_ " She sounded incredulous. "Was this a family lunch? I'm so sorry! We'll just go..." His conscience punched him in the stomach and he hurriedly scribbled his name on the piece of paper. 

  
' _Sky Mercury- sorry for embarrassing you, its my first autograph :)'_

  
_"No wait!"_

  
She and her friends stilled, as he shoved the paper towards his Papa. "What's your name?" 

  
"Hannah." She was still blushing. "You really are a Yank." 

  
"Guilty as charged." 

  
His father handed the paper back to her and she proceeded to get the same signatures from his Aunties. So did her friends. Then they were gone. 

  
" _Great._ " His father griped, playing with the food on his plate. "Now the whole of Britain will know I'm an unfit second-rate parent. _Lovely!_ " He viciously stabbed a hunk of greens with his fork. 

  
"Sorry..." Sky whispered, looking out the window and relying on his mind to help him escape.  _I got defensive. You looked so much happier before. But I guess you chose this life, you wanted to be recognized and beloved by all. Didn't you?_

  
_How long until you decide parenting isn't your cup of tea?_

  
_How long until you leave me at some foreign boarding school or dump me on the government?_

  
_…How long until you stop giving a shit about me?_

  
-X-

" _He told of death as a bone white haze_  
_Taking the lost and the unloved babe_  
_Late, too late, all the wretches run_

 _These kings of beasts now counting their days_  
_From mother's love is the son estranged_  
_Married his own his precious gain_  
_The earth will shake in two will break_  
_And death all around will be your dow'ry..."_

 

"You did want art supplies, right Dovey? Taking after your dear old Papa?" 

  
Freddie lightly chuckled for a moment, before his face turned completely stricken,  _old_... Sky smothered the urge to laugh. It was easy though, he was far too busy staring at everything inside the shop. It was just  _Wow_. He instantly darted off to look around, stilled only by his Auntie Liz's shout.

  
"Oi! Don't go too far! We'll be walking around in the nearby shops, find us when you need us!"

  
Sky called back an affirmative before getting lost in the art stuff once again. 

  
He pulled out a thick pad of drawing paper from the top shelf, after a fair bit of climbing, and sat down to run his fingers across the ridged paper. He loved the feeling of the texture across the pads of his fingers. 

  
_'Feels good, right? That's my favorite too.'_

  
The girl spirit looked to be around nineteen or twenty. Pretty as a picture, with big curls wrapped into her hair like a pinup girl's. He could almost pretend the big ruby stain and rivulets that dripped from the front of her baby blue pinafore were spilled paint. 

  
_'I used to work here after school, it's my family's shop.'_  She reached up to tuck an errant piece of hair behind her ear. ' _That's my Dad working the counter.'_

  
She gestured to a big man with a dour expression on his lined face, the kind of fellow you'd be scared to meet in a back alley at night. But she looked at him like he was the sun and she was the dimly gleaming moon. _'He's wearing my locket. It was a present for my fifteenth birthday. I never took it off...'_ She raised up a hand and touched her neck, as if startled to find it empty. 

  
_'I need him to take it off. But he just can't let me go.'_ She was crying now, silently. _'He needs to throw it into the pond...'_

  
_'He needs to let me go...'_

  
She turned to face Sky again and her eyes were gone, replaced with empty pits. Black holes of soldering sadness and unspoken grief.  _'If he can't let me go, we're trapped. The both of us...'_

  
_'Too much love kills us all...'_

  
Sky set down his paper and reached out a hand, wrapping it around her incorporeal one. He saw another _flash of something,_ but it wasn't of her life or her death, it was a cemetery. One he had never seen before. But before he could properly study it, he was kneeling in front of a headstone. A fresh one.  _Bulsara_...

  
_Farrokh Bomi Bulsara._  

  
He wanted to scream, but his lungs were paralyzed. He knew that feeling far too well. 

  
The moment his fingers roughly caressed the headstone, desperate to scrub the words away. Ashes came off into his hands, falling through his fingers like lost sand in an hourglass. He was crying, gasping but the tears never fell. He clawed deep inside himself, reaching for the part of him that held the real power of his _Gift._ The caustic burn didn't take away the ashes, didn't take away the pain. Instead it became heightened and the words started to squirm and warp in front of his eyes. Doing the sort of ballet his father loved so much. 

  
Finally the tears came and all but cleared away the words, even as the pain only increased, melting his insides like ice-cold fire. 

  
_Rhye Halley Bulsara._

  
This time, he really did scream. 

  
He woke up gasping, the shopkeeper kneeling beside him with concern in those deadened eyes. He was sweaty and trembling, and the poor sod tried to feel his forehead for fever or something equally as redundant. He blinked away his tears, scrubbing at his traitorous eyes and clambered to his feet, dizzily. 

  
"Are you _alright_ , son? Did you have a fit? Should I call somebody?" 

  
He shook his head, ignoring the way his vision swam drunkenly. "No." He coughed. "No, I was just talking to your daughter." 

  
The man's already pale face turned the same shade as sour milk as he shook his own head. "No laddie, you couldn't have, my Tierney's been dead near fourteen years now." 

  
"I know. Dark curls, blue pinafore and pretty as a picture? She's here, just in a new way now." 

  
The man opened and closed his mouth, utterly lost for words. 

  
"You're wearing her locket, right? Trying to be close to her? You shouldn't. It's keeping her from properly passing into _the other place._  You need to let her go, to put her to rest. Neither of you will be able to move on from this if you don't. She says you need to throw it _into the pond.._." Whatever that meant. "She says you know what that means." 

  
_'Daddy, please...'_ She caressed his lined cheek. 

  
The old man shivered and looked all around, as if he'd be able to see her. 

  
"The pond where they found her?  _Bloody hell..."_ He slumped forwards, cradling his head in his hands. Showing just how broken he was for the first time. Sky was looking at a shattered soul. He was still breathing hard, still shaking with a mind full of memories and scenes he didn't want to process. Seeing glimpses of his father's ( _his own?)_ death was not what he'd signed up for. Well. To be fair, he hadn't signed up for  _any of it._ He didn't even _want it._ But there was no one to complain to.

  
" _Bloody hell._.." The visibly shocked man reached up to grab the antique locket in a death-grip, glaring at Sky through his tears. "What if I don't want her to go? What if I want my Tierney _anyway I can get her?"_ His voice hitched. A parent should never have to bury their child. 

  
Sky shook his head, sitting back down on the floor again and reaching out to comfort the old man. 

  
"I know you miss her, but forcing her to stay is only hurting the both of you. She's lost and tired and wants to move on… _and so do you_." The guilt that bloomed in those sorrowful brown eyes was enough to confirm it. "There's no shame in being sick of suffering. I can't bring her back, nobody can. But if you let her go, she'll be happy and one day, you'll be together again in the better place. _I promise_." He had no right to promise anything. But the poor broken man leaned forward into his embrace. 

  
"You can really  _see her? Talk_  to her?" 

  
"Yes." It was best just to be honest when he tried to help. 

  
" _Why? Who... What_  are you?" 

  
Sky shrugged, tugging them both to their feet with surprising strength in his tiny noodle arms. "I don't know. I'm just  _me._ You can call me  _Sky_  though, if you'd like." 

  
A melted nod. "Hullo Sky. You can call me Sam." They shook hands like they hadn't just been on the floor. Like they hadn't been speaking tales of the dead. Tierney stood behind her father and looked upon the exchange with a softened look, her eyes looked glossy and beautiful once again. It was almost like she was glowing from the inside out. He was already letting her go... 

  
"Hello Sam." 

  
Sky stepped forwards to wrap his arms around the imposing man's middle once more. Shaky hands hugged him back this time. 

  
‘ _Thank you, Sky…'_

  
She looked serene, almost happy. 

  
They would be _okay._ He could feel it. 

  
"You _believe me?"_

  
The old man nodded sharply, pulling back to collect himself. "Of course, I would never claim to know all the ways of the world." His arthritic knees crackled as he walked back towards the cash register. Sky wondered just how he had looked at that same man and seen a threatening, imposing figure. He was just somebody's father, broken and beaten-down by life in a way that nobody ought to be. _I just want to believe my child is somewhere better. Or that she will be..._  That's what he meant to say. That's what Sky heard. 

  
"So did you come in for something?" Sam asked, softly, playing with Tierney's locket that hung heavy around his neck. _An albatross._  

  
"Oh!" Sky's eyes widened. "I did!" He hurried back into the aisles to grab Tierney's favorite paper, some drawing pencils, and a small sewing kit. So that he could put it all together. 

  
He set his little stack on the counter and popped up into the tips of his toes _(an Irish-dance move he was well-versed in, although it was quite difficult to balance a toe stand in rubber wellies)_ , to rest his hand against Sam's, trying to convey with his monstrous eyes that everything was going to be alright. 

  
" _Halley!_ We've been looking _everywhere_ for you!" 

  
Brian burst into the shop in a tizzy, fluffy flyaway curls falling into his eyes and several sticking up from all the static energy. "You never came to get us! Did you get  _lost?_ Were you _scared?_  Are you _alright?"_

  
Sky just blinked and dropped down again. Still reeling at the  _Halley,_ nobody _ever_  called him _Halley_. It was just weird. And why was Brian treating him like he was five?

  
"Auntie Maggie, I never _left.._."

  
But the guitarist was too lost in his own head. Eyes raking frantically over Sky like there was something to see. And  _his father_  was supposed to be the dramatic one in Queen. 

  
_"Dovey!"_

  
Speak of the devil. 

  
" _My wayward child!_ We've been looking for you for ages, darling!  _Ages!"_ Freddie threw himself down and flung his arms around Sky, like _the overdramatic queen_ he was, grabbing the little boy's crown-sporting curly mop and forcing him against his hairy chest.  _Ugh. Really?_ He didn't  _go anywhere_. 

  
He scowled up at his father with narrowed eyes.

  
… _You forgot where you left me, didn't you?_

  
_Yeah, he knew the truth._

  
"Oh. Is this  _all_ you wanted then?" 

  
His father gave Sky's selection the same squinted-eye scowl that Sky had just just given him. As if Sky had suggested buying grass and sod to wear on his head. "Dovey, you know they do _sell sketchbooks,_ you don't have to...  _make your own._ " He could practically hear the snootiness in his father's voice, it had a fucking  _texture_. Lordy lord. He rolled his eyes to the heavens. 

  
"Yes Papa, _I know_. But I want to add to the one I already have." Slow and steady as if talking to a child once again. It really felt like that sometimes. Like he and the man before him were existing on two different wavelengths. _(It had scarcely been a day, he couldn't even imagine living a whole life like this!)_

  
_"_ But.. _. why?"_

  
_"Because I want to!_ " He snapped, stomping his booted foot with a pout and looking every ounce of his age, for once. It was then Freddie's turn to roll his eyes, at his contrary son's antics. 

  
"Okay, okay! No need to get all snippy with me, darling."  _Although that seems to be your only defining personality trait at the moment._  

  
Ha, if the man _only knew._

  
Mr. Persian Popinjay, his sire, turned to Sam with a flick of the wrist and an incurably bored expression on his face. "How much?" Gesturing to Sky's stack. The old soul just shook his head and inclined his head towards the nine-year-old in their keeping. 

  
"It's _on the house, sir,_ for that special boy of yours. He can have whatever he likes, whenever. I don't mind." 

  
They all gaped. 

  
"Really, Sam?" 

  
Sky squeaked out, once he'd recovered his voice, and the other man just nodded, pointedly taking off the locket and laying it down on the counter between them, with a sad little smile. "Yes, really. _Bloody little Yank._ " He teased, but the joke never reached his eyes. "You've made me feel closer to _my Tierney_ than I have in many many years. I honestly can't thank you enough for that.  _This,"_ He pushed the stack towards Sky. "Isn't even close to being enough." 

  
" _Oh oh people of the earth_  
_Listen to the warning, the seer, he said_  
_For those who hear and mark my words_  
_Listen to the good plan..."_

  
He walked around the counter and hugged the softened not-so-scary man once again, with all his might. The trembling hands that held him close felt like they had long since missed the innocent touch of a child. Sam and Tierney would be okay. 

  
Sky didn't want to even think about his other vision. _(The premonition of his own death?)_  It made him feel sour and sick inside. 

  
His father's hand was what tugged him away though, stack tucked under one arm and a plainly overprotective scowl on his face. 

  
"Thank you very much. We'll just be going then." A cracked porcelain smile and a look that just screamed:  _get your filthy mitts off my child_. 

  
Auntie Maggie's imposing figure steered him out as well, glaring at Sam as though he were some kind of predator. _Sigh. Dramatic Rockstars_ , the lot of them. Sky waved as they left, Tierney and Sam did the same. She was still with him, just in a different way now. A  _better way._  

  
The moment they were clear of the threshold, Sky's mouth popped open for a scathing remark about overprotective nannies watching his every move and that _maybe_ if they'd remembered _where they left him_ , it wouldn't have been so _stressful_ for them. But instead, he found a little wrapped brown square thrust into his hands by his Papa. He blinked in surprise, but curiosity won out and he tore it open to find a brown leather cover and familiar red etched words:  _The Scarlet Pimpernel._

  
He stared up at his father, flabbergasted. The long-haired glamrocker was shifting from foot to foot and worrying the hem of his shirt to feign indifference. Not looking at Sky. 

  
"I know I'm not  _your friend,_ but maybe you could read it to  _me_ instead? Tonight? I'd love to hear..." 

  
He never heard the rest of the man's sentence, he was too busy hugging the everliving daylights out of him. _"I love you!"_ He crowed like a living breathing Peter Pan. What he meant was:  _I can't believe you listened. I can't believe you actually care..._ Tears bubbled in his eyes, so he roughly scrubbed them away with the heel of his palm. 

  
His father was also suspiciously sniffling. 

  
"Think nothing of it, Dovey!  _I love you too_." That last bit was whispered, but was thick with feeling. Especially when his crown fell in front of his eyes and his Papa pushed it back into its rightful place, with both thumbs. 

  
He should've realized what was coming next. 

  
-X-

  
" _Oh oh oh oh and two by two my human zoo..._  
_They'll be_  
_Running for to come_  
_Running for to come_  
_Out of the rain..._

 _Oh, flee for your life_  
_Who heed me not, let all your treasure make you_  
_Oh, fear for your life_  
_Deceive you not the fires of hell will take you_  
_Should death await you..."_  

 

  
Being trussed up like a turkey in November. 

  
He stood in front of the peanut gallery _(his Papa and Aunties)_ , dressed up in a pair of yellow bellbottoms and a thick blue jacket that made him look like a walking blueberry. Then it was a groovy sweater of black fabric and shiny silver stars. Tights with the night-sky down the legs. A sweater with a knitted Bert from  _Sesame Street_. A bright orange corduroy suit with a purple bowtie. At least a dozen sweater vests. A few sparkly tutus he'd insisted on. More tights. He didn't fight them, even when he left with statement pieces picked out by each one of them. Oh and tutus. 

  
The only thing he refused to do, was let them in the dressing room with him. Even when he struggled to redress himself quick enough. 

  
"Dovey? I'm a bloke as well, I've seen it all." He chuckled, but it was strained. As if Sky refusing him entrance to the fitting room was yet another failing. "Would Bri, Rog or Deaky make you more comfortable?" 

  
A resounding _no_ on all accounts. He didn't want gawking eyes on his polio scars. It was why he didn't wear shorts ever. 

  
He knew they'd see eventually. He just didn't want it to be in some clothing store when they did. 

  
They all looked at him a bit weird afterwards, but he acquiesced to all their clothing demands, which seemed to satisfy them. He shrieked with delight when they passed a few troubadours and Auntie Liz picked him up to put him on his shoulders, spinning around like a carnival ride. He wasn't the tallest, but just about everything was tall for Sky. Who was usually at _ass-level_ at best. 

  
Sky had lost his mother, had lost his home, wondered with an unspeakable ache if he'd ever see Cole again. But in that very moment, his heart was buoyed and it felt like he could _fly_ around the world in a single bound. 

  
It was even better that night, sandwiched between his Papa and Mum Mary in bed. Wearing a new pair of bright yellow footsie pajamas, fresh and clean from a much-needed bath and reading aloud from  _The Scarlet Pimpernel._  

  
' _"Morbleu!" said Bibot, whose purple cheeks had suddenly become white with fear._

_"The cart contained the ci-devant Comtesse de Tournay and her two children, all of them traitors and condemned to death."_

_"And their driver?" muttered Bibot, as a superstitious shudder ran down his spine._

_"Sacré tonnerre," said the captain, "but it is feared that it was that accursed Englishman himself ... The Scarlet Pimpernel."'_

  
It was only made better when his father practically clapped, delighted after the first chapter's conclusion, laughing with his snaggleteeth on full-view. It had only been a day, but Sky knew the rules already. Home meant laughing with open mouths and hair down, it meant cooking together _(or well he and Mum Mary, as Papa was banished from the kitchen)._  It meant watching old black and white movies, like  _Imitation of Life_ , his Papa's favorite. 

  
But watching little mixed-race Sarah-Jane who could pass for white, denying and struggling with her identity really struck a cord with Sky. 

  
Sky, the white-passing son of a woman with muddied Scandinavian lineage and a man who was Persian, born in Zanzibar, and looked it _. (Although the papers didn't seem to share that sentiment)._ Questions burned on his tongue. 

  
_Did you change your name to pass?_

  
_Are you Persian…am I?_

  
_…Am I white or not?_

  
But he didn't know how to ask any of them.

  
He didn't know what he would say to any of the answers either. What it would mean to see _shame_ aglow in his father's eyes. To hear phrases like: _"I'm glad you take after your mother."_ or _"Your nickname is perfect, all safe and unassuming._ " or worst of all _"You should have taken her surname."_ To hear confirmations of his worst nightmare.

  
He wanted to be proud of all that he was, but he had no idea if _his father_ was at all. Or if that should have any bearing on _his own_ racial identity. 

  
Thick dark curls he often tangled his fingers in, cheekbones and teeth that jutted out from his face, but with porcelain skin dotted in freckles that spoke of another childhood and a button-nose to frame his lighter eyes. 

  
He didn't _fit-in_ anywhere. 

  
A soft pillow hit him in the stomach with an loud  _oomph_ and he retaliated by striking his Mum Mary with another, nearly causing her to tip off the bed. They were giggling like rampant school children. Things only got more heady when Freddie, who had been bitching about the state of his throws, joined up and helped Mary gang up on Sky. Eventually the pillow fight was reduced to a tickling war and he nearly wet himself, screeching like a banshee and crying from laughter as they rolled around and rucked up the plush flowery comforter. 

  
_Wrong_. He thought as he wrapped his arms around his Papa's neck, and legs around his middle, hanging up and off the bed like a limpet. _I fit-in perfectly, right here._  

  
Eventually they all collapsed, panting from the exertion. Sky wasn't moving, he was going to sleep where he was, curled up on his Papa like an errant little kitten.

  
The man seemed to have come to the same conclusion, because he pressed a warm little kiss to his son's hairline. 

  
"Goodnight, _my little Bijou."_

  
Sky yawned and snuffled. "What's that?" 

  
"A _treasure_ , Dovey. _My little treasure._ It’s French, just like your book." 

  
"Oh. _Okay_..." He blinked sluggishly, trusting his father wholeheartedly. 

  
And he was out like a light. 

 

-X-

  
" _Ah, people can you hear me?_  
_And now I know, and now I know, and now I know, I know, I know..._  
_That you can hear me._

 _The earth will shake, in two will break_  
_Death all around, around, around, around..._  
_Around, around, around, around..._  
_Death all around, around, around, around..._  
_Around, around, around, around..._

 _Listen to the wise, listen to the wise, listen to the wise_  
_Listen to the wise, listen to the wise man..."_

 

But not for long. 

  
Sky woke to the sound of the door opening in the foyer below, as well as hushed voices, and he crept down the steps with his silent footsie-pajama-ed feet scarcely making a sound. 

  
His Papa had been missing from the bed upon his awakening, and his heart quickened with fear. Visions of his father's death flashing like Cole's camera in front of his bright eyes. He hurried even faster down the steps. Terrified of _what,_ he had no idea, he just wanted to be with his father. When he finally reached the bottom of the stairs, his heart was clawing its way into his throat and he forgot the concept of being quiet entirely. 

  
Sky saw his father standing all half-cocked, with the door as his support and just went for it. 

  
" _Papa!"_ He wailed, sounding even younger than his nine years. Rushing over to fling his arms around the lithe man's hairy waist without preamble or hesitation. Realizing far too late that his father wasn't exactly  _alone_. It was probably also a fair bit of instinct, but at his cry and the first touch of his hands, his father turned and hefted him up on one hip in one fell swoop. The surprising strength rearing its head once again. 

  
"Where did you  _go?!"_

  
He demanded, scowling and trying to sound angry, but it was belied by the sheer terror still oozing through his voice. His rocker father at least had the grace to look apologetic. 

  
" _Sorry, Dovey._ It was the door. I didn't want to wake you both, you two looked so adorable, snuggled up together… I didn't mean to _frighten you._ " A small smile and kiss on his temple. 

  
Sky balked. "I wasn't _scared!" Preposterous._

  
"Oh  _really._..?" His father purred, cocking an eyebrow.

  
Sky just pouted, but leaned into him anyway. He smelled really nice. Like _aftershave and Papa._

  
Then there was the familiar gruff sound of someone clearing their throat, Sky blushed all the way down to his toes.  _Ah geez_ … There were three figures standing in the doorway.

  
A willowy black man with several intricate little braids spiraling down from his scalp, who looked to have _stopped breathing_ in all his shock. A chubby warm-looking fellow with sandy-brown hair and big eyes, whose jaw was near to meeting the floor. And another with lighter blonde hair and a charming little gap between his teeth, who was sputtering and coughing, _after clearing his throat_. 

  
"Oh. _Well._ Better from me than from the papers... _Darlings_ , this is _my son: Rhye Halley Bulsara._ " Sky waved rather half-heartedly. "Although he prefers  _Sky Mercury_  of course." Sky tapped his father's hip pointedly with his foot and was put down, so that he could bob a little curtsy with an imaginary skirt tugged up at the ends. 

  
"It's very nice to meet you, _Aunties_." He chirped, turning on the patented oodles of Mercury charm. 

  
"Serita, Minsy and Sharon." His Papa bent down to his level and explained softly, pointing each one out for clarification. Even as they practically died where they stood. Well, _they were in shock,_ he supposed. 

  
" _Bloody hell._ " Elton John, who he knew as _Auntie Sharon_ , wheezed. Once he'd managed to catch his breath that is. 

  
" _Mel, since when_ do you have a fucking son?!" _Auntie Serita (Peter Straker)_ shrieked, voice cracking from the strain, brown eyes blown wide like overfilled sauce-pans. 

  
"Well, I've been  _alive_  roughly nine years. My birthday was New Years Day. _Ooo_ , but if you want to talk conceptually or within the confines of his single parentage, we'll need to get out some scratch-paper.”  

  
Sky snarked, with that little shit-eating grin of his. Making sure everyone could see his widely-stretched toothy smile. His  _Freddie Mercury_ statement piece. Speaking of, his beloved already-long-suffering Papa gave him  _a look_  like he knew. But still said absolutely nothing at all. In fact he looked only _fondly exasperated. "Sky."_ He groaned pointedly, pinching the bridge of his nose. 

  
The little boy rolled his eyes and crossed his arms petulantly. "Sorry..." Apologizing to no one in particular. As usual.

  
"You really _are_  his father..." Minsy sounded incredulous, but undoubtably saw the connection there. One that they obviously didn't. 

  
"That's what they tell me." A little smile. 

  
Instead of continuing, the sandy-haired man knelt down to Sky's level and extended a calloused hand with a warm smile.

  
" _Hullo Sky_. I've been with your Daddy for quite a while now. He's a really nice bloke, so don't give him too hard of a time of it, _okay?"_

  
Instead of being _a good little boy_. Sky scowled with the fiery fury of a supernova or a woman scorned.

  
"I'm not sure if you realize,  _Auntie Minsy_. But being  _difficult_  is about all I've got going for me at the moment. And I don't _make exceptions."_ He snipped, riding high on his horse, before announcing, "I'm going _back to bed now."_ to the room at large. Flouncing up the stairs without so much as a second glance. 

  
Only, he did pause on the second-to-top step, turning back with that impish little smile that honestly never boded well for anyone. 

  
" _Oh Aunties!_ " He trilled, as annoyingly as possible. "If you really want to do me _a favor_ , you'll make sure my Papa doesn't smoke any more of _these_. I don't fancy having two dead parents, if you get what I mean." 

  
He dangled his father's full pack of cigarettes, the one that had just been safely stowed away in the pocket of his dressing gown only a few seconds prior, between two fingers. His Papa was left slack-jawed. 

  
" _Dovey,_ bring those back  _this instant._ " Freddie ordered, with a pout and an extended hand, like he honestly thought a firm tone and a gesture were going to win him back his cancer-sticks. U _h, no, sorry, those didn't come with a report from The Surgeon General._

  
"No, I don't think I will." He tugged a long white stick out of the pack and met his father's eyes with a dead-on _scary stare_ as he tore it to bits and then promptly ground it into messy dust on the carpet below.

  
" _Sky_. You stop this _foolishness_  right now."  

  
Another cigarette met the same end. Then another. 

  
" _Rhye Bulsara!_  Look at the _state_ _of my carpet!_ " Freddie shrieked, once he realized the mess. 

  
"Better ground into the stupid carpet than _rotting_ _inside your body!"_  

  
Two more joined the pile before his father gathered enough moxie/presence of mind to chase him up the rest of the stairs. Leaving their ( _very confused)_ guests forgotten down below. Although quite frankly, Aunties Serita and Sharon were cheering him on. 

  
"Those were _expensive!"_

  
"So is _eventually meeting your grandchildren!"_

  
-X-

 _"God give you the grace to purge this place_  
_And peace all around may be your fortune_

 _Oh oh children of the land_  
_Love is still the answer, take my hand_  
_The vision fades, a voice I hear_  
_Listen to the madman..."_

  
Sky won that fight, by the way. 

  
It ended with his Papa tucking him back into their bed, next to his Mum Mary. Pressing an unshaven kiss to his temple and tossing the remaining cigarettes into the trash. Sky was near-asleep when it was uttered, but he still remembered his Papa's last words and would to his own dying day. 

  
" _My Dovey, my little Bijou,_ you will _never_ have to watch me die. I'd sooner die alone." 

  
Somehow, that only managed to fill his heart with more dread. 

  
He slept fitfully that night, dreaming of all that was to come.

  
-X-

 _"Oh, but still I fear and still I dare not_  
_Laugh at the madman..._ "

  
-X-


	5. Love of My Life (January 1976)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sky makes some new friends, and Freddie gets to experience a new parenting milestone. :) 
> 
>  
> 
> *Also contains mentions of the Thalidomide tragedy and 70s ableism.

" _Love of my life, you've hurt me,_  
_You've broken my heart and now you leave me._  
_Love of my life can't you see,_  
_Bring it back, bring it back,_  
_Don't take it away from me,_  
_because you don't know what it means to me…”_

 

 

 

  
It only took a week. 

  
A week before the awkward edges and brief periods of suffocating sadness turned into: 

  
"Good morning, my _cheeky little brat!"_  

  
"It's almost _noon,_ you _crazy old geezer_." 

  
Said fondly at both ends. 

  
All of it culminating in a gentle hand, one that pushed a clump of Sky’s dark curly bangs over his eyes, so his _sneaky underhanded_ father could steal half his PB &J. Y _ou know that thing? The rule_ that you shouldn't take away a hungry dog's food while it's eating? Well, Sky...Yeah, he was _a lot_ like that. Freddie was lucky he didn't lose the better part of a thumb. The nine-year-old did scowl and snap his protruding teeth for good measure though, if only to get the point across.

  
But his prissy princess of a father just rolled his eyes. Already far too used to Sky and his antics. 

  
"Are you ready to go, _baby?"_  

  
His Mum Mary reappeared in a floaty white blouse and flowing floral skirt that danced around her ankles. Holding out a hand for  _her_  little boy. The son she'd always wanted. The child Freddie had _finally_ given to her. He’d just come pre-maid, instead of in pieces down an assembly line for her to build herself.

  
She had an unopened Manila envelope tucked securely under her arm, the same one that had been given to his father _that cold night_ a week or so prior.  _Wow._ He hadn't even _opened it_. Neither of them had. Sky mentally sighed. But was as he _surprised?_ _No, not really._

  
He pushed away from the marble island and jumped down to take his Mum Mary's hand, but not before quickly hugging his father and pressing a kiss to his whiskery cheek.  

  
" _I love you, Papa_ …”

  
Sky snuggled in close for a moment, one they both relished in, before: " _Shave,_ you look like _a homeless person._ " Then the little devil bounced off and was out the door, superseded by the indignant cries of his creator.

  
Dressed in his warm star-sweater and sparkly tights, underneath his fat blueberry coat, nattering to his Mum Mary about anything and nothing of substance at all. Just excited to be going to  _school,_ _a real close-by school,_ even if it was only for an interview. 

  
Classes had already begun by the time they got there, it was probably close to lunch hour, as they walked up the heavy limestone steps. She would lift him up accidentally with every other step, she was just that much taller and it made him smile from ear to ear, trying his best not to laugh. Sky wasn't embarrassed to be seen holding his Mum Mary's hand, in fact he basked in it, just thankful to have a hand to hold again. The place she and his father had picked, was one of the oldest and fanciest schools Sky had ever been in, or laid eyes on. Sturdy brick and the lightest of footfalls echoed loudly down the halls, but he marched down them, wholly unafraid. School, even a serious new school in the heart of London, held no fears for him, for it was something universal. The language of learning. 

  
Sky was relegated to a little bench outside the headmistress' office, left to wait quietly while his Mum Mary talked on his behalf and handed over his file for review. 

  
The headmistress was a tall middle-aged woman with short, thin and straight auburn hair threaded with silver and a severe expression on her face. At least, that was what he managed to see through a slim crack in the door. (Of course he didn't wait on the bench). 

  
His Mum Mary looked ten kinds of bored as she watched the headmistress read through Sky's file. Flipping through it with a pinched sort of look on her face. It seemed to deepen the farther she got. What was even in there? Did Mum Mary know? Finally the old bat sighed, lacing up her fingers and snapping the file shut. She was brusque as she addressed his Mum Mary and Sky resisted the urge to tell her off. He wasn't even supposed to be seeing or hearing the exchange in the first place. 

  
"Ms. Austin, I'll be frank, I don't think this school is a right fit for your..." She grimaced, searching for a word. "... _charge."_

  
" _Son_." His Mum Mary corrected, sharply. Her voice was so hard that he almost jumped, he hadn't been expecting that kind of force. "Why ever not? ...Is it a marks issue? He's a very bright boy, I'm sure he could show you so with some sort of placement test?" 

  
The older woman only tsked. 

  
"No, it's not that. He's done well in school, all things considered. But we aren't equipped to deal with his _needs_  here." 

  
Mum Mary's eyebrow shot up to the sky. "His _needs?"_ She stressed, uncomprehending. Sky bit his bottom lip, eyes flicked downcast. He _knew_ that speech, it was worse though, because the headmistress still hadn't even  _seen him._ She only knew his history, which wasn't all that great on paper, not what he could _do._

  
"Yes, his  _needs._ The needs of a child affected by polio. There are specialized schools to take care of children like him now, schools who can help him learn at his own pace and be with  _other disabled children_. It's important for their development, you know? So they don't feel so out of their depth, left out when their peers advance without them." The older woman tapped Mum Mary's hand, as if trying to comfort her. "There's no shame in having a disabled child, dear." 

  
Sky winced. 

  
Mum Mary was gaping. 

  
Wow, that went down _even worse_  than he'd expected. _Yikes._  

  
He hurriedly shut the door and sat back down on the bench, just in time for his Mum Mary to burst out of the office, red-faced and completely livid. 

  
"And _fuck_ you too!" She roared. 

  
It was Sky's turn to gape.  _Whoa._

  
Mum Mary, his Mum Mary with her elfin features, gentle voice and Tinkerbell laugh, had just loudly cursed out an older woman. Torn her a new asshole even. And he'd only heard that last expletive, he couldn't even imagine what else had already been said. She snatched up his hand and all but heaved him out of there. 

  
She even _slammed the door_ for good measure, before they raced down the steps, huffing and puffing with acid or maybe even molten lava swirling in her eyes. 

  
"...Mum Mary?" He prodded softly, bringing the back of their laced hands to his cheek. She just blinked at him, tears of indignation and rage prickling in her eyes. Her teeth were gritted so tightly that she had to flex her tense aching jaw a few times before she could speak. 

  
"You will  _not_  be going to that school. I'll teach you _myself_ before I let you go to a place like that." 

  
She was trembling. 

  
Guilt burned low in his belly, and he peered up at the fancy watch on her wrist. 

  
"Mum Mary? Vicki won't be getting us for another or so hour yet... can we get some ice-cream  _over there_  while we wait?" 

  
Desperate to defuse the situation, he pointed out a little rinkydink shop a few paces away. It looked like a frequent haunt for the local school children, as anything that sold confectionary, milkshakes and ice-cream was wont to be. She followed him wordlessly, allowing herself to be tugged along like a small dinghy in a storm. 

  
He was the one who went through all the motions to get a big cup of strawberry ice-cream, including a boatload of rainbow sprinkles with a cherry on top and two long spoons. 

  
Sky plopped the cup down and pointedly stared at his Mum Mary with his big mismatched eyes, until she seemed to come back to herself for a moment. "Do you not like it?" Her voice was raspy, like she'd used the last of it screaming at that wicked woman. And she probably had.

  
He just smiled and handed her a spoon. 

  
That was the first time she returned the sentiment since marching out of that office. Her smile was sad though, full of fondness marred by it, like shading in a pastel sketch. All her attention was on the ice-cream for the longest time, as if she was studying the mechanism of bringing it to her mouth, until finally... she set the spoon down and looked him dead in the eyes. 

  
"Sky... baby, do you really have _polio?"_

  
"I  _did._ " 

  
She visibly winced, as if his words had been a violent blow, instead of a statement mumbled around a mouthful of sprinkled icy goodness. 

  
"What happened?" 

  
He swallowed. 

  
"I caught it when I was a little baby. Not even a year old yet. ...You gotta understand Mum Mary, where I grew up,  _Polio_ wasn't the big thing to be scared of, not until it _was_..." It was hard to explain. 

  
"You grew up in New York City." 

  
She sounded incredulous and he would too, if he'd had her frame of reference. She was thinking of the sprawling skyscrapers of Manhattan, of the vastness and lights of Time Square. Not tiny _Vinegar Hill_ in Brooklyn, so chock full of immigrants and Irish folk in particular that it was called  _Irishtown_ colloquially. _(But to be honest, a lot of Brooklyn was basically Irishtown)._  Most of the buildings hadn't changed since the 1800s, most didn't even have air-conditioning. The cheap rent often meant poor families would pile in by the bucketful. Just like Sky and his mother. Just like the Brennans when they first came over from Ireland. 

  
It really wasn't a surprise that he found his niche in the immigrant, and Irish community in particular. When every other community treats you like shit, those at the bottom stick together. 

  
But being isolated also meant less access to good healthcare and to _vaccines_ in particular. Those who did get vaccinated were always of school age. Children being exposed to other children. Babies weren't supposed to be at risk. 

  
Sky was a victim of poverty, isolation and a lack of understanding. 

  
He'd accepted that a long time ago, but explaining it to those who didn't understand was far harder.

  
"I did, but you're thinking of uptown. Manhattan and high-end housing, the Towers and Time Square? I grew up in Brooklyn.  _Ha,_ I grew up in _Vinegar Hill,_  where most of the buildings haven't changed since the 1800s and don't even have air-conditioning or working fire-escapes. It's a community made up of poor folks and immigrants, working whatever jobs they can come by in the hope that they'll be able to afford food for most of the week. I knew families in that community far better off than us and some far worse. Vaccines, healthcare, those things weren't really central in anyone's mind..." 

  
He paused, not sure how to phrase it. 

  
"Babies weren't _supposed_ to get sick. The only kids who got vaccinated were the ones going to school with other kids. Everybody assumed that the babies were safe because they wouldn't get exposed. I am a product of _my time and the circumstances in which I was born._ Things are _better_ now, but they weren't like that when my Mama had me."

  
He lisped around some of the words, blocky teeth getting in the way. Sometimes he forgot how to talk when he was nervous. 

  
"I don't blame anybody. Not my Mama, not the community, not even the person who gave it to me. I was so little that  _this_ ," He gestured towards his legs, the nasty scars hidden beneath his tights. "...is all I've ever known." He sighed, swallowing another clump of ice-cream too fast. 

  
"Point is, I got _sick_. And I was sick for a _long time_ , I was crippled for a long time. _(God he hated that word, but it was the term she would understand... nobody else was ever allowed to use it)._ But I'm  _better_  now. It took a lot of work and surgeries and stuff, but I'm  _better_  now. I can dance and run and solve really hard math problems. Polio is just a _thing_ that happened. But it's not  _the only thing_  that happened..." 

  
His sheepish smile faded though, when he recalled what kind of effect that argument had on his Mum Mary. Guilt sharpened and dug in tight inside his chest. 

  
"But I am sorry. I should've warned you about what was gonna be in that file. How she was gonna react? I kind of threw you to the wolves there... and that really wasn't fair. I get if you're mad about it... It's just, I sort of _forgot_ , you know? The Brennans, Cole and my Mama? They always knew about my history. They knew about people's reactions to it. 'Cause the moment someone says ' _polio'_ suddenly it doesn't matter about what happened to you. It only matters what happened to their neighbor or someone on TV. Because that's instantly the label they heap onto you." 

  
He knew he sounded too bitter for nine years old, but he didn't care. 

  
"Polio is part of me, but I can do _so many things,_ Mum Mary!" His arms flung wide for emphasis. 

  
"And so can other kids like me! The disease isn't _uniform!_ And _never_ has it ever affected someone's mental state or ability to think, so she's crazy for thinking polio made me  _stupid_." 

  
His fists were white-knuckle clenched. They only loosened when she stroked them gently, smiling at him with something akin to pride. 

  
"Baby, _I am so sorry_ that happened to you. But don't ever apologize for who you are. I do wish you'd told us, but it's our fault for not reading that file. For just assuming things about you, without even asking." 

  
She pressed a sweet-smelling flowery kiss to the spot between his eyebrows and let her lips linger there for a moment. "I'm just upset at how fast you've grown up." 

  
Sky pulled back, a question alight in his eyes, perspective narrowing. 

  
"Mum Mary... It's been a _week_...?" 

  
She laughed, and he loved the bells, relished in their sound for an instant. "Not what I meant, _Little Doll_. You're simply much _too old_ to be nine." 

  
She paused. 

  
"...simply t _oo much to be mine_." She used her finger scoop up a dollop of ice-cream and plopped it on his nose. He squawked in shock and did the same to her with those lightning fast reflexes. His dollop had more sprinkles though and he cackled like a little witch, as they stained his Mum Mary's pale skin. It would be a lie to say they didn't leave that little shop with messy clothes and faces, not giving a single shit as to what people thought about them. 

  
His Mum Mary spun him in circles down the sidewalk, and each cackle only made her spin him faster. They danced around together like dorks. He pulled a couple step-dance moves out of midair and she tried to copy him the best she could. Which only ended with the both of them laughing louder, leaning on each other like goofs, because Sky was the all-imposing height of a garden gnome. Disturbing a good many other patrons on the streets, before Vicki frantically squirreled them away into his car. Trying to hide the way he was smiling behind his hand. 

  
"I presume the interview went well then?" Gruff but with definite mirth threaded in there. 

  
"Oh not at all. It was  _horrible."_  

  
" _Wretched._ " Sky chimed in. 

  
" _Awful_." Mum Mary pulled a face to make him laugh. 

  
" _Monstrous!"_

  
His laughing made her start up again and he found himself with his face buried in her shoulder, adoration in his eyes.  _My Mama would've loved you._  

  
_"Love of my life, don't leave me,_  
_You've taken my love, you now desert me,_  
_…You’ve stolen my love, you now desert me…_

 _Love of my life, can't you see?_  
_Bring it back, bring it back,_  
_Don't take it away from me,_  
_because you don't know what it means to me."_

  
She saw the scars later that night. 

  
He wanted her to, quite uncharacteristic of him actually. 

  
His Papa was at some party or awards thing. He wasn't entirely sure. But what that meant was a night spent cuddled up with Mum Mary and the cats, watching old movies on a film projector and sharing popcorn. Tom, Jerry and Oscar following him around like a small furry army, before flopping across their laps and having his nails lacquered professionally by Mum Mary's careful loving hands. His right nails were shiny black and his lefts were porcelain white. Black for his Papa and white for his Auntie Mags, as he'd insisted of course. There was no reason that he couldn't have them both. _(She didn't need much convincing)._

  
He hadn't bothered covering up either, traipsing around in an oversized shirt of his Papa's and the tiniest pair of lulu-lemon boxers ever created. Not outwardly giving a single shit. 

  
Mum Mary was obviously _disgusted_ by the scars _(everyone always was, so not exactly a surprise),_  but she didn't say anything or do anything about it. True, he didn't actually look at her for a good hour or so after first coming downstairs exposed, and then she pointedly  _didn't look_ at them. In a way that was far too reminiscent of pity. He couldn't blame her for it though, even  _he_  didn't want to look at his legs most of the time. They were pretty horrific. Sometimes they made him want to vomit. 

  
But they worked well, better than well, and he could cover them up a majority of the time, so that was all fine and dandy, he would never knock the surgeries for doing what they meant to do. 

  
They were just so bloody _ugly_. 

  
The long scars, the most prevalent on his body, were sunken a good inch or two into his skin, the insides all puckered and gnarled like a witch's tree, tracing his inseams like the stitched-together seams of a doll. The shorter cicatrices looked like leeches, red and fat, swollen with scar tissue. Some of them were cut in wavy lines, some of them curved like scythes and others left fucking holes. Gaps in the muscles of his legs. It was sickening. He looked like Frankenstein. There was no part of his legs that remained unmarred.  And the bigger he got, the more they stretched and the worse they looked. 

  
Cole hadn't cared about their appearance. 

  
Well, he _did_ at the beginning, but seeing Sky struggle just to walk in those early days, really put things into perspective. Those legs had been through hell and back, but Sky walked through the seven circles, eventually. 

  
His mother had tried to make him feel a sense of pride in his scars, the same way she did with his eyes and teeth. But it never worked. Not when people treated him like he had leprosy or syphilitic rot, simply by flashing his bare legs in a pair of sensible shorts as he walked down the street. He was rendered  _alien,_ he was turned  _other._

  
And so, he hated it _unspeakably_.

  
But he showed her anyway. 

  
Not because she deserved it. Not because he owed it to her, _(he didn't owe anything to anyone)._ Not because he craved sympathy for a battle fought years ago or the echoes that still shook him to the very core. 

  
He only did it because it had to happen eventually, and he wanted it to be on his own terms for once. For something to be on his own terms, if only for once.  

  
He was honestly more apprehensive of his father's reaction than his Mum Mary's. Awkward as it had been. Sky was just so eager for the amazing and ever-so-talented rockstar to find even more clarification that Sky was _no one_ 's idealized version of a son. He couldn't even go to an ordinary London day-school without fucking it up. All parents wanted their kids to make them proud. …Sky couldn't even go to  _school_.  _Well, they're surely sending you away now. Might as well earn some pity-points till then, it's all you're good for now._ Just the thought made him feel sick. 

  
But he showed her, and found solace curled up with her that night, several furry masses squirming around in their laps and his curls in complete disarray beneath his crown. 

  
She was humming something and he dropped off to the feeling of Tom kneading his bare legs and her lilting fairy voice painting the most beautiful murals across the backs of his eyelids.

  
He smiled sleepily, feeling a special kind of warm inside, the kind that came from her.

  
-X-

  
" _You will remember_  
_When this is blown over_  
_And everything's all by the way_  
_When I grow older_  
_I will be there at your side to remind you_  
_how I still love you, I still love you…”_

  
He sat alone on the balcony a few hours later. 

  
The absolute freezing cold of January in London was going to be the reason he lost a testicle to frostbite, but it was a nice enough contrast to the warmth Mum Mary had instilled in him.

  
She was still sleeping on the couch, and he couldn't bear to wake her. So there he sat, ugly legs pushed through the slats and hanging over the edge. He rested his face against the icy iron and imagined that if he'd truly been fae, he would've been on fire. _Oh well, and yet another Cole theory bit the dust._

  
The cold was nice after a while, grounding. Even though he really should've been going back inside to prevent his untimely Popsicle-esque death. 

  
" _Romeo! Oh, Romeo!"_

  
He was startled by the sound of a distinctly feminine voice calling out to him and turned around to see if it was Mum Mary on instinct. But it wasn't. On second thought, it didn't even sound like her. 

  
" _Let down your hair!"_

  
_There it was again._

  
His brows furrowed and he looked down to see... a  _girl_. A little girl around his own age, standing on the sidewalk before the front stoop, and blatantly staring up at him. She was wearing a pink flowery overcoat, round glasses tinted pink to match, with shiny black boots and a fluffy white beret hiding her hair from view. He just squinted at her, trying to discern if she was dead or not from so far away. In the end he just called out, his voice wavering. 

  
"It's  _Rapunzel?"_  

  
"Oh, sorry! I didn't know your name,  _Princess!"_ She giggled, and it was sort of pretty.

  
He shook his head, exhaustion and cold coloring his movements and slowing his few critical thinking skills. "No. The _quote!_ It's _'Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair!'_ or ' _Romeo! Oh, Romeo! Where for art thou Romeo?'_ but you've gone and twisted them up!" His voice caught and he laughed lightly at the end instead of coughing. She did the same, beaming up at him. 

  
Her skin was the same palate color as when he spilled too much ink while adding details, the spill soaking into the pages of his sketchbook. It always stained them stuck together, sitting one on top of the other, her skin-tone would match the second or third page after the spill. The point where it no longer looks like an _accident_ and instead like _a work of art_. The streetlights made her look angelic, touches of gold coming to fruition splashed across her cheeks. He itched to sketch her. 

  
"I can't hear you!" Oh, yes, she very much could. "You'll just have to come down here! ...We're all dying to meet you, _Punzie!"_  

  
_We?_  

  
As if waiting for their cue, three other heads appeared, poking around the fence. A girl with short straight black hair, freckles dotting her cafe au lait cheeks, hiding behind her  _sisters?… friends?_  A chubby little miss with hair as big as his and another with Donna Summer cleopatra braids and a gap in her smile. They all stared up at him in varying levels of interest and he felt a hot blush burn high in his cheeks, despite the biting cold. 

  
He sighed and peered down at the side of the balcony, eventually tossing caution to the wind and climbing over the railing. 

  
" _Oh my god!_ " 

  
"Get _down!_ You're going to _hurt_ yourself!" 

  
"Oh I can't _look!"_

  
It really wasn't difficult to climb down. Even with his limbs heavy from the cold, his ugly legs could still do their job. There were so many jutting bricks and pieces of kitsch that he wasn't hard to find a foothold on the vertical wall. It was far harder to ignore the peanut gallery. When he hopped off, he marched down the icy steps and crossed his arms. Remembering far too late what he was wearing. Or the lack thereof. His scars were on show for the world to see. 

  
Glasses broke the silence. "...So you're _Baby Mercury_ , right? I mean _who else?_ That's what the paps call you and _everybody_ knows who lives here..." 

  
His voice was glacial. "I prefer  _Sky._ But yeah, close enough. And you are?" 

  
Her smile was almost infectious and brighter than the streetlights that surrounded them. 

  
" _Clem Devereaux_ , your Majesty. These are my sisters: _Comfort, Patience_ and _Peace."_  

  
He recoiled slightly, were they  _The Seven Heavenly Virtues_  or something? 

  
"So _Clem_ is short for?" 

  
" _Clemency_  of course." She winked, tongue peeking out from the corner of her lips. A smile bloomed across his mouth, he couldn't help it. 

  
"Naturally." He quipped, loathe to tear his freaky eyes away from hers. She was an artist's wet dream, all the contrast was killer. _(Yes, he knew what that was. All his sexual-term innocence had been stomped out by the older Irish boys on his Brooklyn block who loved to share their booze and sexual exploits as loud as possible to anyone who would listen. His fear of curse words too, frankly.)_

  
She wasn't lying either, the tabloids had been going crazy all week. _'Queen's Lost Prince', 'Mercury Rising: Queen Frontman's Paternity Scandal', 'Freddie's Baby', 'Rockstar to Single Father'_ were just a few highlights. Of course, most were composed solely of stolen pictures and speculation. A few didn't even know his name and didn't care, while the rest just called him Baby/Sky Mercury. Original. _(There was also one hilarious one that speculated how Brian was secretly a woman and that Sky was he/she’s woe-begotten lovechild with Freddie… He and Papa nearly pissed themselves laughing when they read that mess, so did every Auntie but poor Bri. Who wrote at least three “strongly-worded” emails to the publishing company)._

  
He really hoped the scandals wouldn't affect his father or the band's popularity. Him fucking it all up by just  _existing._

  
Sky noticed a couple of eyes straying to his legs and he was ready to give a scathing retort. Instead all he got was a concerned click of the tongue and Freckles _(Comfort)_ quietly telling him "You should go inside or you'll get sick." She had stepped forwards to say so and Sky's mouth fell open. 

  
_Oh_. 

  
She didn't have _arms_. 

  
Well, she  _did_. But they were... _weird looking_. Far too short and flipper-like, sitting curved and hovering around her chest area. Her fingers were short, twisted and stumpy, like claws. 

  
She bit her bottom lip and looked away when she noticed him staring. He felt her shame like a punch in the stomach. 

  
"I had _polio,_ when I was a baby." He blurted. Gesturing to his stitched-up voodoo legs, surely she had to have noticed. "The surgeries to fix it did _that."_

  
She peered at his legs with a calm seriousness to her countenance, before nodding at her arms. "My Mum took this funny drug while she was pregnant with me. It did _this_." 

  
In later years, they would lie down together under the stars he loved so much and talk about the polio sanitarium, about the nightmares he still had every so often, but that he would deny to anyone else who asked, even Cole. The way being sick; the sensations, the feelings... still terrified him in a way he couldn’t really articulate. The way he still remembered the feeling of being paralyzed and unable to breathe. He couldn't even go underwater while swimming without freaking out. Convinced that he was still in the back of an ambulance, getting ready to be shoved inside the iron-lung that he never forgot.

  
She would tell him about growing up ashamed of her body, a feeling he knew far too well. She would tell him of her mother's lasting guilt from taking that accursed drug that she'd thought was safe, that _her doctor had given her._ He knew a fair bit about guilty mothers as well. Mrs. Devereaux had done everything she could’ve though, the people who she trusted most told her it was _safe._ The same sort of folks who told his mother that babies didn’t need polio shots until they started school. Comfort would talk about how _terrified_ she was that _her own children_ could be affected by her congenital issues, by a choice that wasn't even her own.

  
Both bemoaning that fact that the world was always going to see them both as cautionary tales, _mistakes._

  
She would use the word  _Thalidomide_  with him for the first time. 

  
He would explain the meaning of the words _Post-Polio Syndrome_ and they would both cry.

  
But in that moment, mid-January of 1967: she was fourteen and he was nine, and it was too cold outside for him to be standing out there in little more than his bright yellow teeny-weeny boxers. 

  
He made four new friends that night, _the amazing Devereaux sisters_ , who sounded like a circus troupe of acrobats and promised to play with him come morning light. 

  
As he shivered, curling up on the dirty sheets of his Papa's empty bed, surrounded by blankets that smelled vaguely of hairy Persian popinjay… he _smiled._

  
_-_ X-

  
" _Back, hurry back,_  
_Hurry back, hurry back,_  
_Please, bring it back home to me,_  
_because you don't know what it means to me._  
_Don't take it away from me,_  
_because you don't know what it means to me…_ ” 

 

He woken up to the feeling of a hand in his curls. 

  
His visitor stunk of sweat, cigarette smoke and sharp cologne with vodka undertones. Not his Papa, this touch was different. The fingers were more calloused and the hand smaller. 

  
" _I found him!"_ Auntie Liz called out in that raspy voice of his, not even bothering to whisper-yell for Sky's benefit. He seemed more than a touch drunk. But to Roger's credit, he did make a point of slinging off his jacket and flopping it over Sky, as if his tiny armadillo curl on the huge bed made him look cold. The jacket reeked something fierce, they'd obviously been partying at the awards thing or after, but it was pleasantly warm and placed over him with such care that he didn't dare shrug it off. It was kind of nice. Complete with all the pomp and circumstance of tucking in the edges of the jacket around him, brushing a few curls away from his eyes. 

  
_"Little devil_." 

  
The blonde chuckled softly, voice hardly above a whisper, but it was dripping with a sort of parental fondness. Sky wriggled around imperceptibly, digging in the jacket's pockets, until he had a pack of Marlboros crunched to death in his grip. Those were going straight in the trash. He didn't care how long it took, rotting lungs were not on the agenda for the baby-faced blonde, who'd instantly adopted a dear friend's kid, simply because it was the right thing to do. 

  
Roger Taylor, his _Auntie Liz._  

  
Cancer, the preventable kind, was not going to be the reason he lost his life. 

  
You could always heal him. The tiny voice inside him reminded him. It wasn't lying, he could. But to heal, one had to be hurt. He didn't want that for Auntie Liz. He didn't want it for anyone, frankly. He didn't want to be too late again. 

  
A chorus of footfalls signaled the entrance of more visitors. The familiar fresh scent of his Papa flooded his nose, as did the hands in his hair. Smoothing back the flyaways, a rather futile pursuit. Definitely his Papa. _Why did they always go for the hair...?_

  
_"_ Dovey? Dovey, darling! We're  _home!"_

  
Freddie preened, happy and proud as a peacock. Sky 'slept' on. He could practically see his Papa's pout in his mind's eye. 

  
"Wait, Rog... Is that  _your filthy jacket on my son?"_ Ooo, _testy._  

  
"Well, yeah. Oi, it's not my fault he looked bloody frozen, not wearing any sleep trousers in the dead of winter, stubborn little Yank!" 

  
His Papa sounded bemused and a little concerned. "He's not?" Peering over. 

  
"Oh he is, they're just these itty bitty boxer-shorts. I think he wanted to show me  _the scars_... I shouldn't have asked, I mean I  _didn't_ , I  _wouldn't_ have... But after earlier, I suppose he felt like he  _owed it to me_ or something..." Mum Mary’s voice was thick with sleep, the consistency of buttercream frosting.

  
_Wrong_. But he was too tired to fight. His eyelids fluttered. 

  
"Scars?" The sentiment was echoed by four voices, ah, so Aunties Maggie and Belisha were in attendance as well. Splendid. A party… to watch Sky sleep. 

  
"Yes? The ones covering his legs? Roger, you couldn't have missed them..." 

  
"Well, I  _did."_ He sounded defensive. A gentle unidentifiable hand reached out to tug an ankle free from his small balled up form. Sky was so tired and fuzzy-headed, that the leg in question was floppy and limp. He couldn't even cogently bring himself to care about the intrusion. Not until he heard the: "Oh my God...  _Oh my God!_ " 

  
"That is _so beyond punishment!"_  

  
Roger wailed, or perhaps shrieked given the falsetto edge, but instead of screaming back, Sky simply shifted around and sleepily crawled his way into a sitting position. Not ready for the five sets of eyes that traced his every move and pointedly stopped on his legs, frozen. His very exposed legs. He itched to cover them up and close his eyes to everything. Yet he didn't dare. Instead he scrubbed at them with a closed fist and worried his bottom lip, looking ever unimpressed. 

  
"Because these are the scars from my polio surgeries." 

  
" _Polio?!_ You're _nine!_ You were born in what...? _'66?"_  

  
"' _67._ " That helpful correction came from his Auntie Belisha, who was staring at his scars and so very still that it seemed like he'd short-circuited. He hadn't blinked in ages. But Roger was still carrying on in all his shock. 

  
"'67! There was _a shot in '67! We_ had polio shots by '67!" One of the blonde's hands was clawed and tugging viciously at his long hair, Sky ached to disentangle it. 

  
No eyes had left his scars. 

  
" _That woman_  didn't take you to get a polio shot, _did she?"_

  
His father's voice had taken on such an icy tone that Sky was legitimately afraid for a moment. He'd never heard his father speak quite like that. As if so consumed by cold glacial rage that his voice was _deadened._ Sky shook his head, unable to meet his father's eyes. Shame burned on his cheeks and tears burned in his eyes. So much of his life was fire. He felt  _so rotten_ all of a sudden. Like he was going to be sick. But he just shivered instead, either from the still opened window or his father's tone, he couldn't have been certain. If everything was fire, why was he incapable of being warm?

  
"What's done is _done,_ Papa. Just _let it be_ , okay?" His voice sounded weak even to his own ears. 

  
But _Freddie Mercury_ was far from done. Acid coloring his tone and practically spitting mad, Sky could almost see a blue flame of anger burning in his chest. The hottest part of the fire. 

  
"Let it be?!  _Let it be_ , he says!" His father laughed, but there was no humor in it. Only venom. "She  _crippled_ you!" 

  
_And... there it went_. 

  
Sky's only shred of lingering control over his temper.

  
His inner calm self watched it _evaporate,_ while his outward self jumped up screaming. He was oft indignant and angry by default. But his father had just used  _that word_. Someone had to die. 

  
" _I am not a cripple!"_

  
He screamed so loudly and so fiercely that it felt like something tore inside his throat. His father even took a few steps back in surprise. So did his Aunties and Mum Mary, each looking at him in varying states of shock. He didn't even realize he was crying until he tasted the stinging salt on his lips. This was _his Papa_. He'd knocked Cole around for words like that. He knew the man was shocked, knew that he should've told him. But in that instant it felt like the word  _Cripple_  was branded across his mouth, sewing it shut like that of a pawnshop shrunken head. 

  
" _I'm not a cripple! I'm not, I'm not, I'm not!"_  He punctuated each assertion with a violent kick to the bed-frame, like a toddler who didn't want to go to sleep. 

  
His voice got more and more ragged with each shout. 

  
Eventually it caught somewhere in his chest and he doubled over coughing. A large hand flew to run up and down his back soothingly. His Auntie Belisha looking over at him with those worried eyes, crows-feet branded there in his twenties. 

  
"Love, it's  _okay. Breathe_." 

  
Still coughing, he lurched away so violently that he almost fell off the bed. His face was so hot it burned, and he knew it was probably the color of a cherry cough drop. 

  
" _Get away from me! Leave me alone!"_ His eyes were swollen, wide and wild, lips wet and trembling. 

  
"Dovey, get _down!_ You're going to _fall!_ " 

  
He didn't hear the frantic mess of his father's strained voice. Didn't see the wide eyes or the horror. The tight set to his jaw that spoke of guilt and the acknowledgement that he'd accidentally crossed an invisible line between them. Instead, Sky jumped off and staggered, leaning away from any hand that dared to try and steady him. Staring straight at his father with those starburst eyes. He should've explained better, should've told him everything he told Mum Mary. 

  
Instead he uttered the only words he knew would hurt his father the way  _Cripple_  had hurt him. 

  
_"I hate you._ " 

  
Sky spat, a rare seriousness in his tone, and was off and running in the next second, fleeing to the refuge of his bedroom. He locked the heavy painted door with a clumsy hand and struggled to crawl underneath the bed-frame. With his puffy face pressed hard into the carpet when he got there, so that it would absorb all his tears. 

  
“ _Love of my life, you've hurt me,_  
_You've broken my heart and now you leave me._  
_Love of my life can't you see,_  
_Bring it back, bring it back,_  
_Don't take it away from me,_  
_because you don't know what it means to me…”_

  
The words came of their own accord, like ash heavy on his tongue, and horribly off-key as he cried. Desperate for _his Mama,_ for _Cole, the Brennans_ … for _somebody_ who still loved him _._

  
_He hates you now. Congratulations!_

  
_The last person who could’ve loved you, **you little wicked witch.**_

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> A Pretender to a Throne: "...is an aspirant or claimant to a monarchy that either has been abolished or suspended, or is occupied by another. It should not be confused with the term impostor, which instead refers to a person who exercises deception under an assumed name or identity."
> 
> -Wikipedia


End file.
